With developments over the last few years in Generative AI taking the creative industries by storm, what are its impacts on immersive experience design?

Here we take a look at some of the potential of AI for immersive experience design, as well as looking at some of our favourite tools.

Generative AI brings an unprecedented level of capabilities to designers of immersive experiences; from unleashing visual creativity and speeding up ideation and pre-visualisation processes, to eventually enabling more dynamic storytelling, personalization and adaptability of experiences.

1. Unleashing Creativity

Traditionally, the creation of immersive experiences and particularly 3D content demanded extensive manual efforts from designers and developers. However, generative AI has significant potential to streamline these processes, automating certain aspects of content generation. This newfound efficiency liberates designers from mundane tasks (ie rotoscoping, de-aging, compositing, clean up, reconstruction), allowing them to focus on creative decisions rather than repetitive human tasks.

AI-powered tools can act as collaborators and co-designers: helping to generate new ideas, visual concepts, and interactive elements. A sounding board that is useful in getting rid of ‘writers block’ or ‘designers block’ and ultimately enhancing the overall quality of the ideation stage of designing an experience, and enabling smaller budgets to achieve higher end Visual FX.

Generative AI tools augment the creative capabilities of designers and artists by providing them with a vast array of generative content for areas outside of your core expertise or specialism. Many AI-powered tools can produce music, art, textures and even entire worlds, acting as a springboard for inspiration for creators to enhance their work. Designers can then manipulate, combine, or remix the generative output to develop unique and imaginative immersive experiences that were previously challenging to conceive.

This is really exciting for making complex creative processes more streamlined and accessible, in this recent example a father created some AI tools to turn his son’s drawing into a 3d character. That’s proper magic & this sort of possibility could be hugely disruptive for film, games, design and marketing.

1. Dynamic Storytelling

Storytelling lies at the heart of immersive experiences. Generative AI potentially enriches this aspect by introducing dynamic possibilities that evolve based on user input and choices. In interactive storytelling experiences, AI can augment the way that software respond to users’ decisions, altering the course of the narrative, enabling personalisation and leading to multiple unique journeys through an experience.

This dynamic nature not only has the potential increases user engagement, brand impact and relevance but also encourages repeated interactions as users seek to explore the variety of possibilities offered by the AI-generated narratives. By analysing user data and behaviour patterns, AI algorithms can tailor experiences to individual preferences, creating more meaningful engagements.

Like social algorithms, this could be very powerful for brands. But it also poses some very real ethical challenges, particularly given the large amounts of emotional data that an immersive experience might be able to gather from audiences or users.

Another interesting area is the development of conversational agents: basically using AI to automate characters, in a similar fashion to smart chatbots, working in real time. AI-driven agents can intelligently respond to user input, creating dynamic interactions that feel organic and responsive. Whether it’s in gaming, education, or entertainment, AI’s ability to adapt and respond to user actions adds a layer of depth and engagement previously unseen in traditional immersive experiences. Time will tell if these characters and conversations can get good enough to overcome the ‘uncanny valley’ of CGI and voice, for it to become convincing enough. But this is obviously a hugely disruptive goal for several industries to chase.

Generative AI is revolutionizing the world of immersive experience design, offering the potential unprecedented levels of personalization, creativity, and interactivity. By leveraging AI’s capabilities, designers can craft experiences that adapt to individuals, unleash their creativity, and create dynamic and engaging narratives. Moreover, generative AI enables the creation of realistic situations that captivate users and blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual.

But what does that mean for creativity? It’s understandable why there is a moral panic around the rate that this is all advancing, and the concern that there might be for the future creative workforce: if an AI can do in seconds what a concept artist can do in weeks, then its clear this is going to directly impact on a number of jobs roles. Historically, new technology has always disrupted and changed the jobs and roles that we do.

It’s interesting to see the ways that organisations are responding: ie Artstation and the need for AI creators to include information about how the work was created

As technology continues to advance, and its advancing exponentially quickly, the impact of generative AI on immersive experiences is bound to grow, providing new and exciting opportunities for designers to amaze and delight audiences and create impactful experiences.

A few of our favourite easily available tools and techniques to watch:

Adobe Firefly: Adobe is beginning to release a number of its AI tools into its software including photoshop and premiere. From text to image generation, to image extensions (where you can upload an image and extend its edges, inpainting/generative fill (where you can paint out and replace objects, colours and clothing) as well as a number of interesting text effects, recolouring tools and more.

Runway: Whilst video remains behind imagery in Generative AI, there are a number of interesting tools coming to market that show promising signs to create videos. One of the most used ones is Runway… which can be used for bringing images to life, transforming the look of a video to a different style and even text to video to currently produce short clips.

NeRFs: NeRFs stands for Neural Radiance Fields, which basically synthesise the data between many photographs. Similar workflows to techniques such as photogrammetry, that create 3d data through looking at the difference between images. A good place to start with this is the Luma AI App

If you’re looking to explore an immersive experience design project, contact us here and we’d be happy to help make it a reality.