A forest clearing with a rustic cabin flickers to life on your screen. You press the W key, and suddenly, you’re walking through it, trees swaying as you pivot with the mouse. This isn’t a video game built with months of coding and a game engine. It’s Odyssey, a startup’s bold leap into what they call “interactive video”—a real-time, AI-generated world you can explore like a first-person adventure.
Introducing AI video you can watch and interact with, in real-time!
Powering this is a new world model that imagines and streams video frames every 40ms(!). No game engine in sight.
We call it interactive video, and it's free for anyone to try right now (GPUs permitting)! pic.twitter.com/QtADRXCQ8z
— Odyssey (@odysseyml) May 28, 2025
Odyssey, founded by self-driving car pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is tackling a challenge that feels like science fiction: creating 3D worlds on the fly, powered entirely by AI. Unlike traditional video games, which rely on meticulously crafted assets and engines like Unreal or Unity, Odyssey’s model generates environments in real time, streaming video frames every 40 milliseconds. “Powering this is a new world model that imagines and streams video frames every 40ms(!). No game engine in sight,” the company announced.
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The world played forward, by a model.
On the one hand, it's calm and serene. On the other, it's chaotic and terrifying.
I think the model nailed it in both cases. pic.twitter.com/vuszeL9p0V
— Oliver Cameron (@olivercameron) May 28, 2025
Most AI models lean on publicly available datasets, whether it be scraped internet images or videos. Odyssey, however, built a custom 360-degree, backpack-mounted camera system to capture real-world landscapes in high fidelity. “We’re building a vast dataset of real-world places, all captured in incredibly high-fidelity 3D with a custom hardware device,” said Oliver Cameron. The demo, free to try (if your GPU can handle it), includes environments like a cabin in the woods or a sprawling mall, each generated on demand.
Navigating these worlds feels like stepping into a blurry Google Street View with a twist. The visuals, as Odyssey admits, are rough—textures waver, and layouts can shift unexpectedly. “The environments the model generates are blurry and distorted, and unstable in the sense that their layouts don’t always remain the same,” notes a TechCrunch report.
The potential applications are vast. Gaming is an obvious fit, but Odyssey’s vision stretches further. Filmmakers could craft interactive scenes, letting audiences choose their path through a story. Educators might build virtual field trips to historical sites, reconstructed in real time. Even virtual tourism could take off, with users strolling through AI-rendered versions of far-off cities. “Looking ahead, we’re researching richer world representations that capture dynamics far more faithfully, while increasing temporal stability and persistent state,” Odyssey shared in their announcement.
[Source]
