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The team behind Baidu’s first smart speaker is now using AI to make films – TechCrunch

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The HBO sci-fi blockbuster Westworld has been an inspiring look into what humanlike robots can do for us in the meatspace. While current technologies are not quite advanced enough to make Westworld a reality, startups are attempting to replicate the sort of human-robot interaction it presents in virtual space.

Rct studio, which just graduated from Y Combinator and ranked among TechCrunch’s nine favorite picks from the batch, is one of them. The “Westworld” in the TV series, a far-future theme park staffed by highly convincing androids, lets visitors live out their heroic and sadistic fantasies free of consequences.

There are a few reasons why rct studio, which is keeping mum about the meaning of its deliberately lower-cased name for later revelation, is going for the computer-generated world. Besides the technical challenge, playing a fictional universe out virtually does away the geographic constraint. The Westworld experience, in contrast, happens within a confined, meticulously built park.

“Westworld is built in a physical world. I think in this age and time, that’s not what we want to get into,” Xinjie Ma, who heads up marketing for rct, told TechCrunch. “Doing it in the physical environment is too hard, but we can build a virtual world that’s completely under control.”

Rct studio wants to build the Westworld experience in virtual worlds. / Image: rct studio

The startup appears suitable to undertake the task. The eight-people team is led by Cheng Lyu, the 29-year-old entrepreneur who goes by Jesse and helped Baidu build up its smart speaker unit from scratch after the Chinese search giant acquired his voice startup Raven in 2017. Along with several of Raven’s core members, Lyu left Baidu in 2018 to start rct.

“We appreciate a lot the support and opportunities given by Baidu and during the years we have grown up dramatically,” said Ma, who previously oversaw marketing at Raven.

Let AI write the script

Immersive films, or games, depending on how one wants to classify the emerging field, are already available with pre-written scripts for users to pick from. Rct wants to take the experience to the next level by recruiting artificial intelligence for screenwriting.

At the center of the project is the company’s proprietary engine, Morpheus. Rct feeds it mountains of data based on human-written storylines so the characters it powers know how to adapt to situations in real time. When the codes are sophisticated enough, rct hopes the engine can self-learn and formulate its own ideas.

“It takes an enormous amount of time and effort for humans to come up with a story logic. With machines, we can quickly produce an infinite number of narrative choices,” said Ma.

To venture through rct’s immersive worlds, users wear a virtual reality headset and control their simulated self via voice. The choice of audio came as a natural step given the team’s experience with natural language processing, but the startup also welcomes the chance to develop new devices for more lifelike journeys.

“It’s sort of like how the film Ready Player One built its own gadgets for the virtual world. Or Apple, which designs its own devices to carry out superior software experience,” explained Ma.

On the creative front, rct believes Morpheus could be a productivity tool for filmmakers as it can take a story arc and dissect it into a decision-making tree within seconds. The engine can also render text to 3D images, so when a filmmaker inputs the text “the man throws the cup to the desk behind the sofa,” the computer can instantly produce the corresponding animation.

Path to monetization

Investors are buying into rct’s offering. The startup is about to close its Series A funding round just months after banking seed money from Y Combinator and Chinese venture capital firm Skysaga, it told TechCrunch.

The company has a few imminent tasks before achieving its Westworld dream. For one, it needs a lot of technical talent to train Morpheus with screenplay data. No one on the team had experience in filmmaking, so it’s on the lookout for a creative head who appreciates AI’s application in films.

rct studio

Rct studio’s software takes a story arc and dissects it into a decision-making tree within seconds. / Image: rct studio

“Not all filmmakers we approach like what we do, which is understandable because it’s a very mature industry, while others get excited about tech’s possibility,” said Ma.

The startup’s entry into the fictional world was less about a passion for films than an imperative to shake up a traditional space with AI. Smart speakers were its first foray, but making changes to tangible objects that people are already accustomed to proved challenging. There has been some interest in voice-controlled speakers, but they are far from achieving ubiquity. Then movies crossed the team’s mind.

“There are two main routes to make use of AI. One is to target a vertical sector, like cars and speakers, but these things have physical constraints. The other application, like Alpha Go, largely exists in the lab. We wanted something that’s both free of physical limitation and holds commercial potential.”

The Beijing and Los Angeles-based startup isn’t content with just making the software. Eventually, it wants to release its own films. The company has inked a long-term partnership with Future Affairs Administration, a Chinese sci-fi publisher representing about 200 writers, including the Hugo award-winning Cixin Liu. The pair is expected to start co-producing interactive films within a year.

Rct’s path is reminiscent of a giant that precedes it: Pixar Animation Studios . The Chinese company didn’t exactly look to the California-based studio for inspiration, but the analog was a useful shortcut to pitch to investors.

“A confident company doesn’t really draw parallels with others, but we do share similarities to Pixar, which also started as a tech company, publishes its own films, and has built its own engine,” said Ma. “A lot of studios are asking how much we price our engine at, but we are targeting the consumer market. Making our own films carry so many more possibilities than simply selling a piece of software.”

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Former Ubisoft executives reportedly arrested over sexual assault allegations

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Getty Images / Ubisoft / Aurich Lawson

Five former Ubisoft executives have reportedly been detained for questioning by French authorities, years after they departed from the company amid widespread sexual assault allegations.

According to a report from France’s Libération newspaper (as translated by GamesIndustry.biz), this week’s arrests by the Bobigny public prosecutor’s office include Ubisoft’s former chief creative officer Serge Hascoët and ex-VP of editorial and creative services, Tommy François. Hascoët resigned from the company in July 2020, while Francois left less than a month later. A year after those departures, French labor union Solidaires Informatique worked with two of the alleged victims to file a formal complaint about the alleged assaults, which seems to have led to this week’s move by French police.

It’s not immediately clear who else has been caught up in this week’s police actions or whether the former executives will be released from detention after questioning. Other high-profile Ubisoft employees who resigned or were fired amid the 2020 allegations include Assassin’s Creed Valhalla director Ashraf Ismail, former Ubisoft Canada managing director Yannis Mallat; former Ubisoft PR director Stone Chin; former Ubisoft global head of HR Cécile Cornet, and former Ubisoft vice president of editorial Maxime Beland.

Allegations of toxic workplace behavior against multiple Ubisoft employees started on Twitter and were later expanded upon in wide-ranging reports from Liberation, Kotaku, and Bloomberg. The reports detail multiple instances of inappropriate verbal and physical conduct from numerous employees, including one worker who was reportedly choked at a 2014 party by Beland.

Before his departure, Hascoët had served at Ubisoft for 32 years, rising to become the effective right-hand man to CEO Yves Guillemot. Hascoët’s approval was reportedly necessary for almost every project at the company, and his input helped shape numerous games from the publisher.

Guillemot committed to “major changes” in a 2020 earnings call following the initial allegations, including an internal investigation, overhauled HR policies, and a full reorganization of the editorial department. “Our overriding aim is ensuring that all Ubisoft employees have a safe and inclusive workplace environment,” he said at the time.

A year later, though, a report by French newspaper Le Télégramme cited multiple employees in saying that changes inside the company had been minimal. The company answered that report with a blog post laying out “appropriate actions, including training, disciplinary sanctions, and dismissals.”

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Wii U, 3DS online servers to shut down in six months

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Enlarge / We’d like to imagine there’s an actual Switch like this that Nintendo will be flipping in April.

The end is nigh for online network support on the aging Wii U and Nintendo 3DS platforms. Nintendo announced overnight that “online play and other functionality that uses online communication” on those consoles will stop working in “early April 2024,” just over a year after Nintendo shut off downloadable game purchases on both platforms through the eShop.

In a brief FAQ, Nintendo clarified that players will still be able to redownload purchased software and download game update data “for the foreseeable future.” Players will also still be able to transfer Pokémon off of a 3DS using the Pokémon Bank system after the planned shutdown. And software that uses the 3DS’s unique Street Pass system will also still work since it uses local wireless communication between systems without the need for a central server.

While there are still some people using this now-classic Nintendo hardware online, spot tests suggest that the player numbers aren’t huge these days. A GameXplain test from the beginning of 2023 found a handful of online players for Mario Kart 8 and Call of Duty games on Wii U, for instance, but failed to find opponents for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Mario Tennis Ultra Smash. A similar 3DS test by a YouTuber in January found similarly mixed results, though 3DS launch titles like Super Street Fighter 4 and Steel Divers still apparently had surprisingly strong online communities.

Nintendo already shut down the level upload features for the original Super Mario Maker in 2021, well after the release of its Switch sequel. Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon on the Wii U were also taken offline in March for “extended maintenance” to fix a security exploit. Those games remained offline until early August.

The upcoming Nintendo server shutdown will come almost exactly a decade after Nintendo pulled a similar kill switch for the original Wii and Nintendo DS. After that shutdown, hackers got to work reverse-engineering their own private servers to restore online gameplay. For the 3DS and Wii U, Pretendo is an active open source project that has already replicated some of the soon-to-be-defunct server functionality Nintendo plans to abandon next year.

Earlier this year, Nintendo finally stopped accepting repair requests for the system in Japan, years after doing the same in North America. Meanwhile, reports suggest that Nintendo is ramping up its plans to release a Switch successor next year.

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Is Counter-Strike 2’s new match-abandonment penalty too harsh?

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Enlarge / Mark my words, if any of you jerks abandon the unit, there’ll be hell to pay…

Valve

Anyone who has played a bit of Counter-Strike probably knows the frustration of having a teammate bail on a match early on, leaving your team at a 4-on-5 disadvantage. The recently launched Counter-Strike 2 is trying to limit this problem by imposing a harsh new penalty for players who leave a match before it’s over. But that system is already drawing angry reactions from players who feel they’ve been punished unfairly for unintentional match departures.

In CS: GO, abandoning a competitive match early resulted in a “cooldown” period before you could join a new match. Those periods started at 30 minutes for the first offense and rose to a full week for a fourth offense (one offense was also expunged from the count every seven days).

That punishment system carried forward to the closed CS2 beta in recent months but was reportedly ineffective at slowing down extremely high match abandonment rates. A series of popular posts on the CS:GO subreddit last month asked for stronger punishments, complaining that “almost every single match now has one leaver… I get it, you haven’t played CS in years and you’re butthurt that you’re losing but you’re just wasting everyone else’s time if you leave.”

With the full public launch of C2 last week, Valve seems to have taken that complaint to heart. Leaving a match early now also gets a player a 1,000-point drop in the ELO rating used for competitive matchmaking. That’s a pretty significant penalty, considering players only gain about 100 points for winning a match (against similarly ranked opponents). Under the current system, it could take hours of play to rebuild the ranking loss resulting from a single abandoned match.

Unintended consequences?

That kind of penalty might be an appropriate deterrent for players who would intentionally hurt their teammates’ experience by abandoning tough matches early. But some players are complaining that the ELO penalty also applies to matches abandoned for unintentional reasons, including the kind of game crashes that can be relatively common in a newly launched online game.

Solo players can also receive the ELO penalty if their random teammates vote to kick them for any reason—or even no reason at all. “[This system] gives way too much power to groups of trolls,” one Reddit commenter said of the ability for four committed players to dock a stranger teammate’s rating. “I just lost 1,000 [ELO points] because a teammate randomly decided to [team kill] me and start a vote kick,” another Redditor added. “They were just unhappy to be losing with bad matchmaking. Worked my ass off to get up to 9k+ and got tossed down to 7999.”

Then there are situations where players decide to leave because of bad behavior by their teammates. “Last match I was in, there was a duo on my team that decided to troll and grief our entire team just because I’m a girl. I abandoned because they were just holding us hostage at that point,” one Reddit user wrote. This player complained that there was no warning that an extra ELO penalty would be tacked on for this match abandonment. “I gladly accepted the 30 minute cooldown but even in casual or deathmatch you get warned that you lose XP points if you abandon, in premier you don’t and I’m not sure why,” the player wrote.

There may be other unintended consequences to the new penalty system, as some players are already contemplating using ELO penalties to easily create a “smurf account” with an artificially low ranking to get matched up with less-skilled players. Meanwhile, some CS2 players also report that remaining players in a 4-on-5 game aren’t allowed to vote to surrender even when the player disadvantage makes the match seem hopeless.

We’re still early in what will no doubt be a long life for competitive Counter-Strike 2, so Valve could definitely continue to adjust these penalties as time goes on. For now, though, the new system highlights the tough balancing act the company faces in trying to enforce good sportsmanship for randomly grouped teams in their online shooter.

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