AI Is About To Change Gaming Forever....

Happens when you take a very old game like Half Life on the PS2 and apply an AI filter to that game. Are we going to start to get super realistic video games in the future that can be played at real time with incredible graphics thanks to artificial intelligence? That's what today's video is going to dive into with a thought provoking precedent for the future. So essentially, with Runway's new video tool, many people have been using this to to essentially create realistic video game graphics. What you're seeing on screen is simply GTA San Andreas. But what's funny is that it's currently being used as the driving image video for every frame that you see. Now, currently this kind of video that actually has realistic humans isn't actually playable in real time, unfortunately. I know some of you enthusiastic gamers would love to to install this kind of mod, but this is something that does take a little bit of time. If you record a scene in any kind of game, you'll get this kind of output after putting the filter on it. And it seems rather fascinating because this right here was one of the largest moments in a longer video, which I'll leave a link to the description in. But basically in that video there were a lot of gameplay and in that entirety of that gameplay we saw multiple instances with as long as you have this filter on, the video looks rather realistic. So it was an eye opener for me, especially because I did see something like this a few years ago and I'll dive into that in a moment. But I think the implications for gaming in the future, where potentially video games in real time could look as realistic as this, are going to put us into a new area of reality where the things that we see on our computer screens, perhaps even in VR, are going to be incredibly realistic. Can you imagine playing a VR game that looks like this? It has graphics like this and you can move around in that world. And if you've ever played VR, you'll know that sometimes people tend to lose their sense of spatial awareness. If you've ever seen those clips of individuals running into walls or hitting objects that they shouldn't. The entire point is that the future of gaming is going to be one that is super interesting. I mean, if I did see this clip just randomly, I would have thought that this is a low budget film. But it is actually a video game. And for those of you who don't believe me, just trust me, when you check out the link in the description or you view any of the other stuff, you'll see exactly what I mean. Now I did try this with one of the another clip and it does seem pretty decent. I mean, you can see that the cars do look a little bit weird. So of course right now it doesn't look entirely accurate. Of course there are certain details that the AI still gets wrong. But the point is, is that in the future, I think this level of quality that actually looks really good will eventually be playable. Now, I'm not saying that this is going to be playable on any old laptop. I know that the majority of you who are gamers understand that graphics is very, very intensive. But this might be some kind of hack, as this isn't really graphics, it's just kind of a filter over the initial driving video. So I think it's plausible that maybe there could be some kind of technology where we initially have a really poorly rendered frame. And then because the frames are rendered super poorly, you just apply maybe 90% of the compute on top of that to the filter and. And then that's how the game is displayed. Because you don't need to render everything. Everything is rendered with AI in real time, which is absolutely insane. And it looks even better. But I do think that this is going to mark new era in AI and completely change how video games are played and have some severe implications for older games in the sense that they're about to become super realistic. Now, this isn't the only video game thing that we've seen where video games look super realistic based on, you know, initial renderings or filters. There was something in 2021 that did explore this in some early experiments with decent results. Take a look at this called Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement by Stefan Hassan and Vladim. This was some early research that showed us in 2021 what could happen when you have real time filters applied to video games like GTA 5 and if that gameplay looks realistic or not. This was a little bit before the AI hype, but the video still generated a sizable amount of interest, amounting to 6 million views. Take a look.

But it is in this work we are enhancing photorealism enhancement. To understand what that means, let us have a look at some footage from the game Grand Theft Auto 5. The game looks great, but it is not quite photorealistic. Let us now turn on our method. Our method modifies the images from the game to look more realistic. It is a convolutional network which produces images frame by frame and can be run at interactive rates. This model was trained to translate GTA 5 to the cityscapes dataset. Cityscapes contains mostly images of German cities recorded with an automotive grade camera. Here are a few examples from the dataset. With a model of reality induced by cityscapes, our method paves the roads with smoother asphalt, increases the glossiness of car paint and greens the sun dried hills of GTA's California.

So this is where you can see exactly how this kind of thing works. I think this was one of the early experiments that showed us that this is most certainly going to be really interesting and change the dynamic of how certain games are potentially played. I know I certainly would like to explore a game like this considering the real life graphics are something that have always been touted as some kind of future expectation for gamers. Although I know that some gamers would rather the gaming aspect in the sense that they completely understand that what they are playing is just simulated reality. And I completely understand that. But I do think that there is a huge market out there for games that look entirely realistic. Especially when we have these photorealistic filters and that upon first glance we wouldn't be able to tell if it was real or not. Now I think that might make gaming a little bit more addictive, a lot more than it already is, but I think that is something that future generations are going to have to deal with. Now essentially how this works, like I said before, it kind of works in the sense that you have image to image. If you've ever seen those AI filters where you can upload an image of yourself and then of course it manages to convert that frame into some kind of theme. So for example, you can have the first image right here, which is of course the original. And then of course what you can have is the other filtered versions that apply any kind of theme in which you wish. How Runway's new video to video feature works is by essentially applying the same technique, but just doing it on a frame by frame basis with a lot more consistency than other video generators that have tried this before. So I know I've just oversimplified exactly what's going on, but that's kind of how it works. I know some systems did try something like that before, but it was remarkably inconsistent in the fact that you could tell it was AI. But video to video is a new area. Now in terms of photorealism, there was also this. I'm pretty sure that you may have not seen this if you aren't paying attention to gaming trends. And this is something called U Record. And this gameplay right here is completely built in. Unreal Engine 5. I do apologize for the glitches and Stuff like that. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but I think it's just struggling to play the video. But essentially, the short clips that you can see here, the ones that aren't lagging, this is completely. Gameplay like this isn't real at all. This is complete gameplay. And using certain techniques such as the body camera and of course certain lighting techniques In Unreal Engine 5, you can achieve the desired effect of near photorealism with this game. And this is something that is really, really effective because we've seen that many, many times. Individuals upon first glance of this entire trailer, and I might have some gameplay of this going on screen right now because my screen is currently lagging. But most people weren't able to tell the. That this wasn't, you know, real. Like most people would think that this is of course real, but of course it's just a game. And the crazy thing about this is that this person who created this game got so many different, you know, insults and accusations that, yes, it was just, you know, gameplay and it wasn't a real. The game developer actually decided to go into the viewport where you could actually see them face flying around and showing you that, yes, in fact, it actually was a game that they had created within Unreal Engine 5. Now, unfortunately, the game currently isn't released. I presume that maybe a big studio picked this up and they are currently developing this, but there are currently iterations of this game that are playable and it's under a completely new genre called body cam games. Now, this isn't AI related at all. This is just a video game that, you know, individuals are working on. But it does go to show that the generation of gamers that have currently played games and understood how great they look are clearly going to experience something remarkable in the2030s and of course the2040s, when all of this technology becomes readily available on many different devices. I really wanted to make this video, although it isn't the kind of video I usually make in terms of covering the normal tools and software. But I think this kind of thing is rather important as it shows how much AI can impact certain areas, whether it be from gaming to healthcare to advancing medical research. I mean, there's just many different areas that AI is going to impact that you might not think about. So after this video, I'd recommend go ahead and you watch all the videos on this channel that I've linked in the description because their examples are a lot more realistic and it will showcase exactly how AI rendering can work in the future. And if you want to check out more AI rendering, you can also check out Google's project where they managed to render Doom on an AI. And if you want to check out more AI related rendering things within gaming, you can check out how Google managed to completely render a game in real time.