Story is king

In 1986, Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs, and John Lasseter founded Pixar, which would become the world's most iconic storytelling company. At its core, Pixar held the steadfast belief that the story must shape the technology—not the reverse. This philosophy drove Pixar to pioneer computer graphics throughout the '80s and '90s, with Ed himself contributing endless technical innovations that remain industry standards today. These groundbreaking achievements paved the way for the world-changing stories Pixar produced, and earned Ed the prestigious Turing Award in 2019.

At Odyssey, we share the belief that technology must serve the story and the storyteller. In the age of artificial intelligence, this is more true than ever. Given this, we’re thrilled to welcome Ed Catmull to Odyssey’s board of directors, and for him to invest in our company. Ed’s unparalleled experience as President of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios will be an invaluable asset for us on our journey to the next major technological breakthrough for film, gaming, and beyond: generative world models.

Meet Explorer, a generative world model

The best stories transport us to new worlds. In masterpieces like Toy Story, Inside Out, Star Wars, Dune, Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, Red Dead Redemption, and The Last of Us, artists spent tens of thousands of hours in 3D creation tools handcrafting detailed worlds, full of unique characters, scenery, and music. These time-consuming processes are both a major enabler and bottleneck for film, gaming, and more.

Enter Explorer—our first generative world model. Explorer is an image-to-world model that transforms any image into a realized, detailed 3D world. Although early, generative world models like Explorer offer the promise to significantly accelerate the creation of film and gaming-compatible worlds, in addition to enabling brand new applications or forms of entertainment. Explorer is now in use by a growing group of artists and we're excited to open up access to many more.

Explorer generates photorealistic worlds

Explorer is particularly tuned for generating photorealistic worlds, and it’s clear that this is a core strength of the model. While early, we’re excited to see the levels of 3D detail and fidelity Explorer can already achieve, and its potential for use in live-action film, hyper-realistic gaming, and new forms of entertainment.

Explorer generates moving worlds

Our world is constantly in motion, and Explorer’s worlds should be no different. Although earlier in research, generative world motion, all in 3D, holds exciting promise to enable artists to generate and manipulate motion in new and more realistic ways, in addition to providing fine-tuned control that’s difficult to replicate in generative video models.

Explorer generates gaussian splats

Over the last 18 months, many of the top computer graphics and vision researchers in the world have turned their attention towards gaussian splats. It’s easy to see why, with splats being capable of reconstructing scenes with incredible, almost imperceptibly real detail. This growing research momentum, and a feeling that this is the 3D representation on the ascendancy, was critical in our decision to adopt splats as our world representation for Explorer.

Explorer worlds can be edited by hand

Creative tooling providers have taken notice of the momentum behind gaussian splats, adding early support for visualizing and manipulating splats in tools like Unreal, Houdini, Blender, Maya, 3D Studio Max, After Effects, and more. What this means for our users is that, for any world you generate with Explorer, you’ll be able to load it into your preferred creative tool of choice and, if necessary, hand-edit the generative world to achieve your desired goal. It's been incredible to see all the ways artists have used this strength of Explorer.

We’ve trialled Explorer in production workflows

As a test of Explorer’s production readiness, we recently collaborated with Garden Studios in London. We beamed Explorer-generated worlds onto their state-of-the-art virtual production stage—used to record feature films, television, commercials, music videos, and more—and were thrilled to validate that our generative worlds could be utilized in real production workflows today. They looked incredible.

Explorer is improving fast

We’re hard at work improving all aspects of Explorer, in-particular:

• We see a clear path to real-time world generation and what that might enable, but today, Explorer generations currently take an average of 10 minutes to complete.

• Explorer can increase resolution and world-completeness, extending generations seamlessly to fill any gap and create full spherical worlds.

• Explorer will achieve better controllability through video-to-world and world-to-world inputs. Eventually, Explorer will be able to take a real-world captured gaussian splat as input and enhance it based on a prompt or other guidance.

We’re releasing access to Explorer progressively

Today, Explorer is in the hands of a growing group of artists, and they're using it for incredible things. If you're interested in access to the model and collaborating closely with us, we encourage you to fill out this form and to register your interest. We're committed to reviewing every submission, and are so excited to welcome anyone who will push the model in interesting ways.

It's time to explore

Generative world models are the newest and most unexplored major frontier in all of artificial intelligence. We aspire to worlds that build themselves, that feel indistinguishable from reality, where new stories are born and remixed, where human and machine intelligence interact for fun or purpose. Just like it was impossible to predict all the ways language models would change the world, we think the same is true of world models and their vast potential. If all we ultimately achieve are incrementally better films or games, we will have fallen short.

Explorer is our starting point, and we’re excited to invite you along for this journey and to see what even early versions can empower you to create. As we rapidly scale real-world data and compute, and partner closely with legendary storytellers like Ed Catmull, Explorer’s performance will only accelerate from here on out.