Popul8 Q&A – How Generative AI Can Solve One of Gaming’s Age-Old Issues

wccftech.com:

In mid-April, I covered a press release about the launch of Popul8, a generative AI tool designed to make the life of artists who work in game development studios a lot easier.

Created by a tech company called Didimo, Popul8 boasts the ability to create countless unique characters at scale. How many times did you play an open world game whose supposedly vast and realistic virtual worlds were actually populated by the same dozen character models, substantially taking away from your immersion?

It is an intrinsic problem that no videogame has been able to solve. However, generative AI technology may be the key to finally moving past that limitation. To further discuss Popul8 and its features, I had a great chat with Didimo founder and CEO Veronica Costa Orvalho. You can find the full transcript (edited for clarity) below.

Can you talk a bit about your company?

Absolutely. Didimo was founded in 2016. We are Techstars alumni from London.

We've built it as a result of more than 15 years of R&D on how we can automate the character creation process with the overall goal of providing an easy, fast, nonexpensive way for companies to include digital humans and now to include any type of characters in their virtual worlds.

My whole dream, I guess, what keeps me going every time it's difficult, is the conviction that digital characters are the element that will connect us in a more human way between us and the virtual world. It will create our identity, in whichever shape and form we decide it to be.

How many employees do you have right now?

We're currently 25 at the moment. Most of them are part of the engineering team, and then the rest is business development, marketing, and admin financial support.

But the core is mostly super top