A team of researchers from the University of Lyon, Purdue and Ubisoft have published a paper showing what may well be the future of creating video game worlds: an AI that is able to construct most of its own 3D landscapes.




Similar to Nvidia’s work that is able to conjure its own celebrity mugshots, the tech would require only minimal input from a human, who would just have to contribute some basic requirements, draw some lines then let the AI do all the hard work: namely, filling in all the gaps with elevation, ridges and natural-looking rock formations.

As the paper states, this kind of tech would only be the beginning; future research could lead to landscapes being generated entirely by the AI, and for the model to be able to handle more complex environmental features like sand and vegetation.