Nvidia has announced a number of plugins for developers to use its Nvidia Ace digital human technologies in Unreal Engine 5.
This opens up the possibility of photo-realistic human characters in games that can speak to you conversationally, much like a digital assistant.
During Computex in June, Nvidia unveiled its suite of digital humans technologies, which it calls Nvidia Ace. The accompanying video was jaw-dropping, showing how AI and intelligent graphics techniques can create photo-realistic avatars for use across multiple sectors.
The main application noted at the time was for putting a human face to a digital assistant – imagine if you could see Alexa or Gemini while you speak to them. AI would not only power the look of the assistant, but enable it to respond like a real person, with accurate lip sync and movements.
Certainly, Meta seems to be interested, having debuted its own deepfaked human avatar for Meta AI during Meta Connect. It could be a matter of months not years before we see the first fully interactive digital humans launched for everyday use.
Now Nvidia has its sights on gaming – the usual bedrock of the company. It announced during this week's Unreal Fest that it is launching development tools for studios to use Nvidia Ace with Unreal Engine 5.
This is significant as, although we're yet to see more than a handful of Unreal Engine 5 games hit market, they are on their way. And considering the development software allows for photo-realistic backdrops and scenery, why not include human-like characters too?
As 91Mobiles points out, there are a select handful of plugins Nvidia has created to help developers include more realistic avatars, including Audio2Face-3D, which uses AI to make lip sync and facial animations smoother and more accurate.
Perhaps more exciting still, the intriguingly named Nemotron-Mini 4B Instruct plugin will help developers create generative AI-powered dialogue interactions with players. For example, you could talk to NPCs in a game in real-time using normal language and they will respond naturally, no matter what you say.
It's all interesting stuff and, save for Nvidia seeming like the real-world equivalent of Skynet from Terminator, this has the potential to change the world – even beyond the next-generation of PC and console gaming.
