Just a few years ago, Berkeley engineers showed us how they could easily turn images into a 3D navigable scene using a technology called Neural Radiance Fields, or NeRF. Now, another team of Berkeley researchers has created a development framework to help speed up NeRF projects and make this technology more accessible to others.

Led by Angjoo Kanazawa, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, the researchers have developed Nerfstudio, a Python framework that provides plug-and-play components for implementing NeRF-based methods, making it easier to collaborate and incorporate NeRF into projects. Kanazawa and her team will present their paper on Nerfstudio at SIGGRAPH 2023, and have published it as part of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Conference Proceedings.

“Advancements in NeRF have contributed to its growing popularity and use in applications such as computer vision, robotics, visual effects and gaming. But support for development has been lagging,” said Kanazawa. “The Nerfstudio framework is intended to simplify the development of custom NeRF methods, the processing of real-world data and interacting with reconstructions.”

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An intriguing new artificial intelligence project called “The Simulation” is exploring the possibility of autonomously creating new episodes of the hit animated series South Park. Researchers from Fable Studios have published a paper detailing their approach, which combines multi-agent simulations, large language models, and custom visual generation systems.

The goal is to develop an AI “showrunner” agent that can generate high-quality, customized story content aligned with the style, characters, and sensibilities of South Park. The system would allow users to essentially “program” their own new episodes by providing high-level prompts and guidance.

Key to the approach is the use of a simulated South Park world, populated by digital versions of characters like Cartman, Kyle, and Stan. This provides context and backstory to seed the creative process. Users can influence events and character behaviors within the simulation to set up storylines.