Roblox shows new 3D AI tool gunning for 'realtime creation integrated with gameplay'

The Roblox Developers Conference is underway, and at the keynote address CEO and co-founder David Baszucki came out all guns blazing. We're gonna have a billion daily users! 10% of all global gaming revenue! We already have your children! OK not the last one, though he might as well have, and you can read all about Roblox's rude health and even ruder goals here.

There was an element of pie-in-the-sky about some of the keynote. But one of the genuinely impressive touches came when Baszucki gave a flourish in the direction of AI, which Roblox has been gradually integrating into its creator development tools for years. It has a tool that helps automate creating textures, for example, but apparently we ain't seen nothing yet.

Roblox is developing an AI «3D foundational model» that will be open source and create 3D assets through text, video and 3D prompts. Baszucki describes this as an «incubation project» with around 40 dedicated employees, and says they're only three months down the road on it. He then shows an overhead view of a map being created through simple text prompts, then becoming a desert, then prompted into becoming a forest scene (with both a text and image prompt).

This is a pre-recorded element of a stage presentation, of course, so take the above evidence of this AI model's capabilities with a pinch of salt. 

“We’ve been building generative AI into Roblox for years with tools like Assistant, Texture Generator, and Avatar Auto Setup. But these are just beginning to scratch the surface of what we have planned,” said Baszucki. «We see a powerful future where Roblox experiences have extensive generative AI capabilities to power real-time creation integrated with gameplay—in a resource-efficient way so we can make this available for everyone on the platform.»

[Unfortunately I can only currently embed the livestream: when the full video is available, I'll replace the below with a timestamped link]

The most intriguing promise is that idea of «realtime