Meta, formerly known as Facebook, presented a prototype of an artificial intelligence system that allows people to generate or import items into a virtual world with voice commands. The company sees the tool, which is called «builderbot“, as an “exploratory concept” that shows the potential of AI to create new worlds in the metaverse. The CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, showed the prototype at the Meta AI: Event inside the lab in a pre-recorded demo video.
In the video, Zuckerberg explained the process of building parts of a virtual world by describing them. He begins, for example, with the message, "let's go to a park." The bot then creates a 3D landscape of a park with green grass and trees. Zuckerberg then says "actually, we're going to the beach," after which the bot replaces the current landscape with a new one of sand and water. He then says that he wants to add clouds and points out that everything is AI generated. Zuckerberg then changes the picture by saying that he would rather have altocumulus clouds, which is meant to demonstrate how specific voice commands can be.
It then points to a specific area of the water and says "let's add an island there", and the bot creates one. Zuckerberg then issues various other voice commands, such as adding trees and a picnic blanket. He also adds the sound of seagulls and whales. At one point, he even adds a hydrofoil, a nod to one of his favorite hobbies, which it later became a meme.
Throughout the video, the builderbot use only voice commands to create 3D objects and place them on the landscape. In it blog post in which the prototype was announced, Meta He said the tool will "fuel creativity in the metaverse," but there are no technical details.
Image Credits: Meta
The technology, if successful, could have implications for other virtual reality worlds and platforms. For example, the Roblox gaming platform has started testing voice features in recent months and offers his development platform. It's interesting to imagine how a company like this could one day adopt the kind of technology shown in the Meta prototype for a similar world-building experience.
However, in its current form, the world he created builderbot it is quite simple in terms of appearance and functionality. And while it may be fun at first to speak commands to make objects appear, it's not a scalable way to create more complex 3D environments. If anything, it could be a fun playground for an entry-level experience in creating virtual worlds. (Unfortunately, however, Meta is already proving that your virtual environment may not be a safe place for minors.)
The presentation of Meta of its prototype comes as the company is spending billions in the metaverse. Earlier this month, Meta He launched Finance for your Reality Labs, split for the first time and revealed that it lost more than 10 billion dollars last year. The company said it expects losses to only increase this year, indicating that Meta He apparently has infinite capital to spend on building the metaverse and probably has the time to pull it off sooner than other smaller companies. The company's deep investments in the metaverse also suggest that we will see more prototypes designed to advance the metaverse.
Although a true "metaverse" may not yet exist, Zuckerberg and Meta they've used the buzzword a lot over the past year and even pushed their recent corporate rebranding. Zuckerberg previously described the metaverse to investors as a "virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces. You can think of this as a built-in internet that you're inside of instead of just looking at."
Meta made a few other announcements, including his plans to AI-based chatbots, an understanding tool about AI, or with a universal voice translator. The company says the latter could provide instant speech-to-speech translation in all languages, including those that are mostly spoken, which would be a leap over existing translation systems. Meta he noted that 20% of the world's population does not speak languages covered by current translation tools and that he plans to overcome this by implementing new machine learning techniques.
