At its Game Developers Conference, NVIDIA presented a series of tech demos to demonstrate how their AI tools can be used to voice, animate, and script dialogue for non-playable characters (NPCs). These NPCs are capable of generating unique responses to player actions, enhancing the gaming experience with more dynamic and varied interactions.
One of these tech demos, Covert Protocol, showed the potential for AI to create highly interactive and personalized gaming narratives. Players engaging with AI-powered NPCs can influence the game’s direction, leading to multiple possible outcomes. In truth, the demo wasn’t awesome, but it’s early days. When this tech matures, it will be more than awesome.
Covert Protocol was developed in collaboration with Inworld AI and utilizes NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). This partnership with Inworld AI extends beyond gaming applications, and the upcoming release of Covert Protocol’s source code should spur broader adoption of ACE technology among developers.
One other standout was NVIDIA’s Audio2Face, which was showcased in World of Jade Dynasty and Unawake. This tool simplifies the process of creating multilingual games and producing realistic facial animations, addressing the challenges of language diversity and character expression in game development.
If you have any doubts about how AI will impact video production, look no further than the demo videos from NVIDIA’s GDC.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.