This AI Tech Aims to Revolutionize your NPCs
Nvidia just had a tech demo at Computex 2023 – a multi-hour affair you can watch in full here. It covers a wide variety of topics, most of which we can safely ignore because the AI stuff is too damn cool.
It’s not the first time tech like this has come into the gaming space. If you’re a Skyrim player this may seem familiar. The game’s modding community has seen some AI experimentation, the results of which have… well, Skyrim levels of jank. But at least they’re not caused by Skyrim this time!
Now, a large tech business is taking a look at the problem. The actual demo itself is fairly barebones, but carries and weighty implications – exactly what you’d expect of a tech demo. The framing of the presentation, fake-gameplay and all, is very E3-esque (may it rest in peace). In a cyberpunk bar, the player receives a mission from an NPC. They get some backstory details, learn where the objective is, all the usual stuff. Funny enough, the player seemed more robotic than the NPC. It’s outright stated that the dialogue here – including the voice acting, lip syncing, and body animations, were all done by AI.
While you might not be able to see tech like this in near-future upcoming titles, the far future could look very different. The idea of NPCs that can react to you dynamically, remember the player’s actions and responses for later use, and potentially even generate quests, is a pretty appealing one.