- Kyle Chua
Computex 2023: Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine Makes NPCs in Games More Intelligent!
Updated: Dec 19, 2023
Nvidia is leveraging generative artificial intelligence (AI) to make games more immersive and lifelike for players.
The silicon giant at Computex 2023 announced Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a custom AI model foundry service for games that makes non-playable characters (NPCs) more intelligent through AI-powered natural language interactions.
As modern games become more content- and feature-rich, they take way longer to develop. Much of that time involves creating and programming how NPCs might interact or respond to players' actions. Nvidia wants to streamline that process with its new tool, with developers being able to use ACE to build and deploy customised speech, conversation and animation AI models in their projects. It would, for example, allow an NPC without recorded dialogue to communicate with the player in real-time, complete with voice lines and unique animations.
"Generative AI has the potential to revolutionise the interactivity players can have with game characters and dramatically increase immersion in games," said John Spitzer, Vice President of Developer and Performance Technology at NVIDIA. "Building on our expertise in AI and decades of experience working with game developers, NVIDIA is spearheading the use of generative AI in games."
ACE was built on Nvidia's Omniverse platform for metaverse applications and developed using a number of the chipmaker's foundation models, including Nvidia Riva for the speech-to-text and text-to-speech features and Nvidia NeMo for the large language model that powers conversations. The tool also uses Omniverse Audio2Face for creating expressive facial animations of NPCs to match any speech track.
Nvidia noted that developers can either integrate the whole ACE solution or use only the components they need. It also said the neural networks powering the tool are optimised for different capabilities, with various size, performance and quality trade-offs.
Nvidia showcased the tool's capabilities by working with Nvidia Inception startup Convai on a demo of a real-time avatar platform called Kairos. In it, players can interact with Jin, the purveyor of a ramen shop. Jin uses natural language processing to deliver realistic replies consistent with his backstory. The demo was rendered in Unreal Engine 5 using the latest ray-tracing features and Nvidia DLSS.
"With NVIDIA ACE for Games, Convai’s tools can achieve the latency and quality needed to make AI non-playable characters available to nearly every developer in a cost-efficient way," said Purnendu Mukherjee, Founder and CEO of Convai.
Other developers already using the tool include GSC Game World, who's working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl, and Fallen Leaf, an indie developer working on a third-person sci-fi thriller set on Mars.
Nvidia at Computex 2023 announced Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), a custom AI model foundry service for games that makes non-playable characters (NPCs) more intelligent through AI-powered natural language interactions.
The tool streamlines the development process of games, allowing developers to leverage AI models to build and deploy customised speech, conversation and animation in their projects.
It was built on Nvidia's Omniverse platform for metaverse applications and developed using a number of the chipmaker's foundation models.