Midjourney CEO David Holz describes the potential for games to one day be “dreams”(opens in new tab) and it certainly feels like we’re moving hastily in that direction.

Applying AI to augmented or virtual reality isn’t a novel concept, but there have been certain limitations in applying it—computing power being one of the major barriers to its practical usage. Stable Diffusion image generation software, however, is a boiled-down algorithm for use on consumer-level hardware and has been released on a Creative ML OpenRAIL-M licence. That means not only can developers use the tech to create and launch programs without renting huge amounts of server silicon, but they’re also free to profit from their creations.

ScottieFoxTTV is one creator who’s been showing off their work with the algorithm in VR on twitter. “I was awoken in the middle of the night to conceptualize this project,” he says. As a creator myself, I understand that the Muses enjoy striking at ungodly hours.

What they brought to him was an amalgamation of Stable Diffusion VR and TouchDesigner(opens in new tab) app-building engine, the results of which he refers to as “Real-time immersive latent space.” That might sound like some hippie nonsense to some, but latent space is a concept fascinating the world right about now.

At a base level, it’s a phrase that in this context describes the swelling potential that artificial intelligence brings to augmented reality as it pulls ideas together from the vastness of the unknown. While it’s an interesting concept, it’s one for a feature at a later date. Right now I’m interested in how Stable Diffusion VR manages to work so well in real time without turning any consumer GPU (even the recent RTX 4090(opens in new tab)) into a smouldering puddle.

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