World Labs, an AI company that has agreed to join AMD, has opened Frameboy, an early test of a demo people use in a web browser. People pick a place and steer a camera through it, and the company's AI model, Atlas, draws each new view as they steer, at up to 15 pictures a second. Until now, people using Atlas asked for a video and waited for it. Last year World Labs put out a similar demo built on a smaller AI model, and Atlas is much bigger and can build a whole place from a single picture or a written description.
World Labs calls Atlas a world model, an AI that learns how the world behaves so it can predict what happens next. Here, what comes next is the view: as you turn or move the camera forward, Atlas draws what you would see from the new spot. Some of the places start from a single picture, and Atlas makes up the rest of the scene. Others are real places that World Labs says it rebuilt from photos taken from a handful of angles. The demo's list mixes real places, such as the Palace of Fine Arts and Sutro Baths, with made-up ones like a spaceship interior and a frozen fortress.
The company says speed changes how people use Atlas. When each video took tens of seconds or even minutes, people had to plan their camera paths with care. When the view answers right away, World Labs says, a bad idea costs almost nothing, so people try more things.
World Labs says worlds like these could help try out camera angles for a film shoot, check progress on a building site, sketch a level for a video game or give a robot a place to practice. In Frameboy, people choose from places World Labs has already set up. It has also added the live mode to Viewfinder, its web app where people build their own scene picture by picture. Viewfinder is open only to testers, with a waitlist.
Frameboy has limits. It runs on powerful computers in the cloud, and World Labs says that is not cheap compared with drawing a scene on your own machine, though it expects, if history is a guide, that the cost will fall as hardware and software improve. No outside group has published tests of it yet. The company has not said whether it will charge for Frameboy or how long the test will stay open. World Labs expects its deal with AMD to close by the end of 2026, pending regulators' approval and other usual conditions.