Few sectors have seen a faster rise in stock than AI in the past year as every news outlet churns out content, every tech company invests, and every VC’s inbox is flooded with pitches. Mindverse is one company that has a particularly futuristic slant on the technology and their MindOS beta has the metaverse and Web3 gaming in its sights.

If it isn’t Midjourney, it’s ChatGPT. You cannot move for talk of AI at the moment — its benefits, its potential, its risks — but many of us are particularly interested in how it will interact with another fledgling technology: blockchain. In an episode of the Mint One podcast, John and I discussed AI in gaming and I went on an impassioned ramble about what AI could do to game worlds. I believe the analogy I used was that Grand Theft Auto’s NPC citizens could have real lives, schedules, changing relationships, dynamic dialogue, and so on.

My deepest desires for the future of gaming bubble up from the sense that games, blockchain, and AI will coalesce into a new and profound experience. There are so many ways in which the three can combine, it’s difficult to pull all the strands apart, but many are interested in it. For example, the CTO at Immutable, Alex Connolly, said this to Cointelegraph in January of this year:

I think we are really excited about the potential for this technology to create more meaningful counter-play for opponents, so one challenging thing in things like trading card games or things like RPGs is building an AI that is the right degree of difficulty for and is tailored somewhat to the needs of the players. I think we think we can create really deep and immersive, ongoing learning curves for players that sort of match up to where they’re at in the games.”

— Alex Connolly, Chief Technology Officer at Immutable (via Cointelegraph)

Well, one Singaporean company maybe be the first through the gate with combining blockchain, AI, and games, launching a closed beta in a few days.

What Is MindOS?

Mindverse is the company behind MindOS. MindOS allows users to customize and train AI to fit their company’s needs, whether sales, marketing, customer relations, etc. The AI can be visually customized, have its voice altered, and most impressively, be taught to act in certain ways and understand certain topics.

For example, your MindOS Genius (the name for the AI bots) could troubleshoot with customers about your company’s software. The Genius can look and sound like you and you can drop your website and training manual into the bot to have it learn the contents. This is fascinating, but the applications many are focusing on are a little dry for my tastes. What I’m interested in is the company’s vision for the metaverse and gaming.

One key feature of MindOS is the creation of 3D, AI-infused NPCs — roughly what I was yearning for with my aforementioned Grand Theft Auto analogy:

MindOS lets you build NPCs in minutes that will keep your users entertained for hours. MindOS NPCs have fully customizable personalities and bodies, contextual memories, and awareness of your game’s world and plot line.

— MindOS

This is, of course, an incredible feature to have in any game, though it would require some monitoring! A concern I have had for a while is that early iterations of the metaverse may fall into Uncanny Valley, even if they were created in Unreal Engine 5.2 and had a large playerbase. That is, they’ll feel a bit lifeless. If NPCs were AI-driven for tutorials, guidance, shopkeeping, and so on, it could make a significant difference to the user experience.

If you are interested in integrating the closed beta of MindOS into your game, click here. The future is coming at us quickly, isn’t it?