Source: Wall Street News Author: Zhang Yaqi
Roblox has decided to invest in the development of 4D AI tools to help creators make more interactive 3D content and provide a faster and easier way to achieve immersive experiences.
Under the trend of AI, an increasing number of technologies and enterprises are turning to the field of artificial intelligence. The concept of metaverse, which once was popular, now seems to have fallen into a "outdated" embarrassment.
On the 17th, Roblox, as the former "leader of metaverse", issued an announcement that they decided to invest in generative AI.
The announcement stated that Roblox is currently developing new AI tools and hopes to help creators make 3D content more quickly.
However, static objects are no longer able to meet Roblox's ambitions. In its latest statement, they proposed a higher goal-4D AI.
What is 4D AI?
Roblox stated that 4D AI not only makes 3D objects look realistic, but more importantly, it can interact between elements. This interaction is complex, many-to-many and spontaneous encounter, rather than a preprogrammed procedure. Interactive 4D elements can be added to a larger environment, and generative AI is responsible for coordinating the style of each element and supporting the interaction between objects and the environment.
Roblox hopes to transition 3D models to interactive 4D worlds with just a few simple commands.
During the craze of the metaverse concept, Roblox was popular among young people who love virtual worlds with its unique concept of "digital paper people". But with the outbreak of AI technology, people's enthusiasm for it has cooled down, and Roblox seems to have become the "abandoned child" of capital, with its stock price dropping from the peak of $134.72 per share to $35.9 per share now.
Roblox, who is unwilling to sit still, decided to invest in AI. In the announcement, developers affirmed Roblox's early AI tools and expressed their vision to develop 4D AI.
Facing three challenges
Achieving this goal is not easy. Not only because, at the technical level, the generative system that connects 4D elements has not been fully built, and multimodal AI is still in the training phase; but also because 4D AI as a completely new concept, remains in an unknown field.
Based on this, Roblox proposes three challenges it currently faces:
1. Functionality: Objects created by future generative AI tools need to be functional. For example, a car is not just a sturdy shape, it should also have rotating wheels and opening doors.
AI needs to find the correct position of the wheels and add the axles so that the wheels can operate like in the physical world. It also needs to find the position of the door, cut open an opening, add hinges, and make the door capable of opening and closing.
2. Interaction: Objects created by future generative AI not only need to be able to operate independently, but also need to interact with other objects in the environment. Objects should have real physical effects, for example, when an over-speeding car crashes into a boulder, it will explode.
This requires mutual understanding of the physical characteristics between the created object and the environment it interacts with. Roblox has an advantage in this regard because the platform itself is a physics engine. When AI creates a 4D object, it adds its physical properties, such as material, mass, and strength, to prepare for interaction with other objects in the physical world.
3. Controllability: Generative AI sometimes creates unexpected works. For example, when someone requests a picture of a rabbit, they may receive a variety of results: a real rabbit, a chocolate Easter bunny, a cartoon bunny, a painting of a bunny, or an illustrated bunny wearing a coat. Therefore, we refine the prompt to request realistic images or "stylized" images to approach our expectations.
To achieve the creators' ideas, we need a faster and simpler way to communicate with AI, making our relationship more like partners rather than completely random like a treasure hunt game.
Solving these challenges requires multimodal understanding between appearance, shape, physics, and script. If Roblox can successfully achieve 4D AI, creating immersive experiences will become faster and more accessible. With more than 77 million daily active users on the Roblox platform, 4D AI can bring a significant amount of novel and diversified content to the platform.
Editor/Lambor