Minecraft remains remarkably popular a decade or so after it was first released, thanks to its unique combination of quirky gameplay and open-world building capabilities.
A copy called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the flavor of the original game with a remarkable and strange twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that comes up with every frame.
Oasis was created by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched, a company that designs custom silicon to demonstrate the potential of hardware optimized to power transformer-based AI algorithms.
Oasis uses a transformative AI model similar to the one that powers a large language model – apparently only trained on endless examples of people playing Minecraft – to come up with each new video frame in response to the previous one and to user input such as clicks or mouse movements . Oasis is a similar video generation model to Sora, except that the user can control its output.
You can play Oasis online for free and it’s both fascinating and surreal to explore. Aside from hiding strange artifacts like deformed cattle and stairs that go nowhere, the game has an uncanny Inception-like quality to it. Since each frame is generated based on what the AI model imagines should come after the frame it’s currently seeing, the game world is never completely stable and will happily shift and transform with a little nudge. If you stare too closely at a texture, for example, when you look up again, the blocky world in front of you may be completely different from the one you last saw.
Gif: Will Knight/Oasis
