Anchor your snow globe worlds to real locations from Google Maps. Google Project Genie is rolling out today to all Google AI Ultra adult subscribers worldwide, following its US debut in January. The service is also getting a new Street View feature that can generate interactive landscapes based on real-world locations found on Google Maps, starting with places in the United States. Project Genie is Google’s AI-powered system for creating explorable snowball environments from written prompts, with creations lasting 60 seconds at 720p and 24fps. Users can create contained worlds in the style of their choice, with a character of their own description, and then move a camera around that space. The new Street View feature allows users to base their AI worlds on location photos pulled from Google Maps, basing their creations on a snapshot of reality. In a demonstration video presented on I/O, Google, for example, transformed the Golden Gate Bridge into a scuba diving scene. Google plans to expand Street View interaction to more real-world locations over time. In appearance and in Google’s advertisements, Project Genie looks like a Cocoon world generator, producing perfect little video game bubbles from vague written prompts – but that’s not really what’s happening here. Project Genie is in no way a game generator and it is silly to suggest that. Among a series of technical differences, it ignores the expertise and precision required to create coherent, responsive, bespoke mechanics in persistent, believable worlds, and belies the importance of narrative flow in interactive stories. Project Genie is capable of generating a limited 3D environment with a controllable camera attached to an avatar. That’s cool, but it’s not game development. Post navigation Google’s Circle To Search feature can tell you if an image was generated by AI
