Following a rising interest in serious gaming technologies, ongoing debates and discussions have highlighted the importance of key virtual, augmented, mixed, and extended reality (VR/AR/MR/XR) infrastructure.
Companies like Meta Platforms, Apple, Improbable, Gamefam, Nokia, Unity, Epic Games, NVIDIA, and many others have stepped up their own efforts. Through each company’s solutions, game developers have accumulated ecosystems essential to content creation, physics, and human-computer interfacing (HCI).
Apple’s recently unveiled its Developer Program to incubate the next generation of programmers for its Vision Pro headset. Released in June, the headset will launch months before the programme opens for applicants. Meta has also launched its own programme for the upcoming Meta Quest 3, leading to stiff competition.
No matter how advanced, native development environments still require solutions from independent, third-party companies like Didimo to facilitate virtual environments. Developing digital content at scale remains a core obstacle to creating realistic, high-quality immersive gaming spaces.
To explore this further, XR Today was pleased to interview Veronica Costa Orvalho, CEO, Didimo. We discussed Didimo’s Popul8 solution and how it solves issues linked to scaling up diverse digital assets.
The company’s top executive also spoke about the future of game development, how such solutions can create returns on investment (ROI), and shared thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro headset.
New Problems, Radical Solutions
When asked about how Didimo developed its Popul8 solution, Orvalho explained that her company thoroughly researched the market. The company had spent two months surveying creative directors, producers, and game directors for preliminary research.
According to the executive, her company wanted to develop non-playable characters (NPCs) at scale. For many in the industry, creating tonnes of characters for populating virtual worlds was “time-consuming and expensive.”
She explained further,
“We created a software solution that allows game studios to define how they want their virtual worlds or games to be. Imagine [developers] want to create the diversity of a city like New York. They can define all the properties of how they want ethnicities and the types of characters that they want to have by automatically generating them. On top of that, artists […] only need to create outfits, makeup, and garmets, and other assets once and then automatically asset-fit the content to all the other digital characters being created”
Didimo’s Popul8 asset generator saved companies time and money, reducing game and metaverse developer budgetary expenses “tremendously.”
One technical feature of the solution allowed people to save further expenses by memorising global positioning for virtual environments.
For example, she stated that 1,000 characters would host 1,000 geometries and textures, raising company costs when rendering on screen. Popul8 would also allow people to eliminate the number of rendering calls needed to complete workflows by reducing 1,000 calls to only one.
She added: “That’s how much we can optimise memory usage when creating NPCs socially. Now, you can have tonnes and tonnes of characters on screen at the same time.”
Didimo’s Popul8 and Generative AI
When asked how AI empowered Didimo’s Popul8 solution and facilitated future gaming technologies, she said the firm had employed it “for many years.”
Didimo used generative AI (GenAI) for its machine learning, AI algorithms, computer graphics, and computer vision technologies. Used for two main objectives — creating synthetic characters and creating RT3D creatures — Popul8 significantly boosted productivity pipelines.
🤝#GameDevs here’s a fast way to create a single or group of characters to match your vision. Popul8 offers time-saving features: edit body, face, skin, and more quickly with inputs and automatically randomize editing choices across a group in a flash ➡️ https://t.co/Kqr0ceMOpV pic.twitter.com/H6g9kg2QkH
— Didimo (@didimo_co) July 24, 2023
Orvalho explained that Popul8 leveraged AI algorithms “from a subset of data” to “create millions of unique characters.” Both objectives allowed Didimo to extend use cases for the Popul8 platform.
Continuing, she said,
“[This applies] not just for photorealistic digital humans, but also cartoons, new species and creatures, and others. For example, we’re working with a AAA game, [if they require] orcs and elves, we’ll produce them using the style they want, characters to create, and can then create a database of elves. Each will be unique, one after the other, from the one that we create. That’s how powerful artificial intelligence is becoming, and for us, it’s the [driving force] that creates these infinite, unique NPCs”
Additionally, as an end user for Unity and Unreal Engine, Didimo’s Popul8 tool can export files to custom engines, the former two gaming engines, or a web player. She noted that the content creation platform worked across gaming engines to produce digital assets and adapted to numerous gaming studio competencies.
Over the last two years, Didimo helped studios export high-fidelity level of detail (LoD) assets to more graphical-intensive games.
Conversely, Didimo could adapt to games requiring less detail and cartoon-styled graphics with fewer polygons. “Regarding quality, we’re engine agnostic,” she added.
Game Creation Workflows with Popul8
For developer workflows exporting avatars and digital assets to the Popul8 solution, she stated her company worked directly with gaming studios.
To accomplish this, studios decided whether they wanted to use Didimo’s latest population software. Companies could do this either out-of-the-box, using Didimo’s specifications or their bespoke parameters.
Gaming studios could then define these parameters by adding digital content to a specific set of assets, such as a basketball team. Studios could then set characteristics for each basketball player using the Popul8 platform and, later, across multiple basketball teams.
She explained,
“They will be able to output the different basketball teams that they have created. That’s option one, and then we’ll use our geometry rig and textures. Another option is [that gaming studios] can provide us with the style of games they have. They can provide us with their mesh, rig, and texturing system, and we can set that up in our software. Later, we deliver a version of the software with the specifications they have created so that all the characters will come out with their specifications”
Doing so allowed Didimo to accommodate work pipelines “very easily,” eliminating painstakingly sophisticated workflows for importing and exporting assets. The company ensured that all exported assets were “production ready” while also automatically and aesthetically validated.
Speaking on the rise of serious gaming technologies, or gaming infrastructure used to create metaverse technologies, she added that memorising character variations had become “a very key feature” of her solution.
This allowed game developers to scale up assets needed for headsets, PCs, laptops, mobiles, and many other platforms. “That’s the beauty of it,” she stated.
Thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro
Finally, she shared her thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro, which Apple unveiled at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) on 5 June this year.
She said she wished she had a “crystal ball” to understand the future of the premium headset. For her, it was exciting to see a company like Apple introduce a new headset to the market. Additionally, she would like to see a “killer app that would encourage everyone to move onto the Vision Pro headset.”
Orvalho explained further,
“When that killer app comes in, I think the market will [be keen on] adopting it. I’ve been researching and developing in VR for more than 15 years, and it’s kind of a personal promise. Hopefully, someone will one day have the resources to build that [killer] app everyone would like to enjoy and use. That’s when you know the Vision Pro would really kick across metaverse platforms like Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite. They will become so big because people want to use it, and I hope that, one day, people will see the software that we’re developing could become a fundamental element in every game studio”
She added that game creators would no longer need to consider using default characters for their game titles. Furthermore, Orvalho hopes that future games will have their own in-game editors, allowing content creators to upload their digital assets adapted to the game.
“That would be amazing, and that’s what I’m looking forward to in the next few months,” she concluded.
