The 'Syntheverse'

What is 'The Syntheverse'?

'Generative AI' has already begun to unlock new possibilities of expression. Instead of making human creativity obsolete, these tools give us new capabilities, supporting deeper, richer experiences that straddle the line between imagination, simulation, and reality. 

Researchers recently used OpenAI’s GPT-4 to ‘animate’ the residents of ‘Smalltown’, a synthetic village that sees the same emergent interpersonal dynamics we find in the real world - with all its gossip, friendships and politics. In other recent projects - LDM3D and Text2Room - researchers demonstrated how to take a bit of descriptive text and translate it into a fully realised three-dimensional world, explorable in virtual reality.

Where these innovations intersect - as they will over the next several years - we’ll see the explosive growth of the ‘Syntheverse’: a new kind of synthetic environment - described with text prompts, populated with increasingly realistic simulations of form, function and fauna - fully interactive, inviting, and available.

The entertainment industry will find a wide range of fictional use cases for the Syntheverse. Many will first experience the Syntheverse as an adjunct to a game or film or comic book. Yet the bigger story - and a multi-trillion-dollar business - sees the Sytheverse become the natural successor to the spreadsheet. Instead of rows and columns of numbers animated by behind-the-scenes by formulate, the Syntheverse will allow us to get our hands and minds around the processes, politics, and problems of the real world. 

We will use the Syntheverse to simulate a courtroom trial, a hospital ER ward at peak capacity, and the effect of a new building on the surrounding environment. All of these can already be done - but they’re hard to build, and require extensive, expensive resources, so we don’t make the effort. That’s about to change. The Syntheverse makes the world of ‘serious games’ - simulations with purpose - cheap as chips. Within a decade we’ll think nothing about emailing someone a simulation as a way to frame a nuanced response to a complex problem. As it changes the way we understand and communicate complex systems, the Syntheverse will also change the way we think.