UC San Diego Professor Unveils "Mirage" Neural Game Engine, Promising User-Created Virtual Universes

San Diego, CA – Zhiting Hu, an Assistant Professor at the Halicioglu Data Science Institute at UC San Diego, has announced the launch of "Mirage," a real-time interactive world model designed to revolutionize video game creation and gameplay. The announcement, made via a recent tweet by Professor Hu, highlights Mirage's capability as a "next-gen neural game engine" that will enable users to "create their own GTA."

Professor Hu expressed significant enthusiasm for the project, stating, "🔥🔥Super excited to launch Mirage: a real-time interactive world model for video games! Play and create your own GTA with this next-gen neural game engine!" He further elaborated on the transformative potential, noting, "Gaming is going to be very different. Soon, everyone will be creating and sharing their own universes ♾—with unique worldviews, mechanics, visuals, agents, interactions, goals and tasks—all simulated by a world model."

Mirage, rooted in the concept of a "general world model," allows for the simulation of dynamic environments and interactive content generation. This technology is designed to predict future world states in response to various actions, offering a foundation for robust, grounded reasoning within AI systems. Professor Hu's prior work, including the recently published paper "Pandora: Towards General World Model with Natural Language Actions and Video States," provides the technical underpinning for such capabilities.

The underlying "Pandora" model, developed by Professor Hu and his collaborators at Maitrix.org, integrates large language models (LLMs) and video generation models to create interactive video states controllable by natural language. This hybrid autoregressive-diffusion model can generate consistent videos across diverse domains, from indoor and outdoor scenes to robotics and various 2D and 3D game environments, including simulations reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto V. The system's ability to accept free-text actions for on-the-fly control is a key innovation, enabling users to dynamically influence the simulated world.

The development signifies a major step towards highly personalized and user-driven gaming experiences. By allowing individuals to craft and share their own simulated universes with unique characteristics, Mirage aims to democratize content creation within the gaming industry, moving beyond pre-defined game narratives to truly emergent gameplay.