An artificial intelligence could soon allow players to transform their video game character to look like anything or anyone they want, simply by typing a description.
鈥淚f you want to be a movie star, or you want to be an animal, or you want to be anything, you just type on your keyboard and, boom, you will have a character that looks like what you described,鈥� says at Beihang University in Beijing, China. Tested examples include Barack Obama, Emma Watson, Bruce Lee and a dog man.
Many video games offer parameters that players can tweak, often by sliding buttons along scales, to adjust the appearance of a character. Zou and his colleagues have been working on the NetEase game Justice Online, giving an AI access to those parameters to automate the process.
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Within the millions of possible permutations of those parameters, the AI can sculpt the avatar to look like virtually anything that the player requests, as long as it falls within the boundaries of what the producers allow.
The version of Justice Online that uses this technology is due for launch later this year, and the system could be used in other games in the future.
at the University of Sussex, UK, says making the AI create designs via parameters is wise because giving it too much freedom could lead to designs that break the game.
鈥淕ame characters are going to have a fixed limit of detail to guarantee the game runs at a minimum frame rate,鈥� he says. 鈥淭raining an AI to effectively slide all the sliders that are already present in character creation systems is a sensible solution.鈥�
at the University of Essex, UK, who co-created the 1978 game says customisation of characters is key to getting players invested in a game, but people are still likely to fall into stereotypes when creating characters.
鈥淏ack in the text days, we only had text to customise. So, people would describe their in-game character in words,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e did find that a lot of people seem to describe their characters the same way. So, a lot of the male characters would be tall, thin, dark, emanating an unmistakable sense of power. A lot of the female characters would be redheaded, with green eyes and an upturned nose with freckles.鈥� He says a similar thing might happen if people are using words to get an AI to create the look of their characters.
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