Ground your snow-globe worlds in real-life locations from Google Maps.
Project Genie is rolling out today for all adult Google AI Ultra subscribers across the globe, following its debut in the United States this January. The service is also getting a new Street View capability that can generate interactive landscapes based on real-world locations found on Google Maps, starting with places in the US.
Project Genie is Google’s AI-powered system for creating explorable snow-globe environments from written prompts, with creations lasting 60 seconds at 720p and 24 fps. Users are able to create contained worlds in whatever style they’d like, complete with a character of their own description, and then move a camera around that space.
The fresh Street View functionality allows users to base their AI worlds on location photos pulled from Google Maps, grounding their creations in a snapshot of reality. In a demo video shown at I/O, Google turned the Golden Gate Bridge into an underwater scuba scene, for instance. Google plans to expand the Street View interaction to more real-world locations over time.
On the surface and in Google’s ads, Project Genie looks like a Cocoon world generator, producing perfect little video game bubbles out of vague written prompts — but that’s not really what’s happening here. Project Genie is not a game generator by any means and it’s silly to suggest so. Among a suite of technical differences, it ignores the expertise and precision required to create consistent, responsive and bespoke mechanics in persistent and believable worlds, and belies the importance of narrative flow in interactive stories. Project Genie is capable of generating a limited 3D environment with a controllable camera attached to an avatar. This is cool, but it’s not game development.
