Odyssey's new artificial intelligence, developed by an AI startup, allows users to navigate photorealistic digital worlds in real time. The developers call the project "an early version of the Holodeck" - the famous simulator from the science fiction universe "Star Trek". Although the technology is still far from ideal, it already demonstrates unique capabilities for generating interactive spaces that resemble real places.
The main difference between Odyssey and traditional video games is its approach to creating a visual space. Instead of pre-rendered polygonal models, Odyssey generates images dynamically using powerful clusters of Nvidia H100 GPUs located in data centers in the United States and Europe. Every 40 milliseconds, the system creates a new frame, reacting to user actions and the context of previous scenes. This allows you to achieve the effect of a "living" world, which changes depending on the behavior of the researcher.
Currently, three virtual locations are available in the demo version: a forest with a wooden hut, the interior of a shopping center, and parking in front of an office building. The user controls the movement from the keyboard-similar to how they move in first-person video games. However, the behavior of objects still remains unstable: some elements may be passable, like ghostly ones — for example, the walls of houses-and others, on the contrary, block the path, even if it is a normal fence.
Image quality is still at an average level — the developers admit that visual scenes resemble blurry panoramas from the Google Street View service. Textures are sometimes fuzzy, and individual details can "float" or change. Sometimes the camera moves automatically, especially if the user doesn't move for a while.
The development team emphasizes that the project is at an early stage. Improving the visual quality and physical behavior of objects is planned in the next stages — using neural network filters that should eliminate noise, artifacts, and texture instability.
Despite its technical limitations, Odyssey is already demonstrating the potential of a new form of interaction with virtual worlds. In the future, such technologies may find applications in education, entertainment, and even remote meetings and simulations. However, to fully replace traditional video games or cinema, the system still has to overcome many technical challenges.
