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Comment by 0xcb0 | Hacker News Reader

I keep on repeating myself, but it feels like I'm living in the future. Can't wait to hook this up to my old Oculus glasses and let Genie create a fully realistic sailing simulator for me, where I can train sailing with realistic conditions. On boats I'd love to sail.

If making games out of these simulations work, it't be the end for a lot of big studios, and might be the renaissance for small to one person game studios.

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Isn't this still essentially "vibe simulation" inferred from videos? Surface-level visual realism is one thing, but expecting it to figure out the exact physical mechanics of sailing just by watching boats, and usefully abstract that into a gamified form, is another thing entirely.

Why wouldn't it just hook it into something like physx?

Google has made it clear that Genie doesn't maintain an explicit 3D scene representation, so I don't think hooking in "assists" like that is on the table. Even if it were, the AI layer would still have to infer things like object weight, density, friction and linkages correctly. Garbage in, garbage out.

Google could build try to build an actual 3d scene with ai using meshes or metaballs or something. That would allow for more persistance, but I expect makes the ai more brittle and limited, and, because it doesn't really understand the rules for the 3d meshes it created, it doesn't know how to interact with them. It can only be fluffy-mushy dream images.

Yeah I have a whole lot of trouble imagining this replacing traditional video games any time soon; we have actually very good and performant representations of how physics work, and games are tuned for the player to have an enjoyable experience.

There's obviously something insanely impressive about these google experiments, and it certainly feels like there's some kind of use case for them somewhere, but I'm not sure exactly where they fit in.

The bottleneck for games of any size is always whether they are good. There are plenty of small indies which do not put out good games. I don't see world models improving game design or fun factors.

If I am wrong, then the huge supply of fun games will completely saturate demand and be no easier for indie game devs to stand out.

It's very impressive tech but subject to the same limitations as other generative AI: Inconsistency, inaccurate physics, limited time, lag, massively expensive computation.

You COULD create a sailing sim but after ten minutes you might be walking on water, or in the bath, and it would use more power than a small ferry.

There's no way this tech can run on a PS5 or anything close to it.

You raise good points, but I think the “it’s not good enough” stance won’t last for long.

Five years is nothing to wait for tech like this. I'm sure we will see the first crop of, however small, "terminally plugged in" humans on the back of this in the relatively near future.

> and might be the renaissance for small to one person game studios.

Indie games are already bigger than ever as far as I know.

> If making games out of these simulations work, it't be the end for a lot of big studios, and might be the renaissance for small to one person game studios.

I mean, if making a game eventually boils down to cooking a sufficient prompt (which to be clear, I'm not talking about text, these prompts are probably going to be more like video databases) then I'm not sure if it will be a renaissance for "one person game studios" any more than AI image generation has been a renaissance for "one person artists".

I want to be optimistic but it's hard to deny the massive distribution stranglehold that media publishing landscape has, and that has nothing to do with technology.

Honestly getting a Sunfish is probably cheaper than the a VR headset if you want to "train sailing"

...and then, the pneumatics in your living room.

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