Midjourney Metaverse? CEO David Holz Confirms AI Startup is Building "Real-Time Open World Holodeck"

Update, 11:35PT: Hours after running this post, I received a late-night reply from Midjourney CEO David Holz himself, in answer to my email with the subject line, "Confirm Midjourney holodeck announcement?", which cited the below quote attributed to him, then asked if that characterization was accurate.

Holz's one sentence reply: "roughly correct quote yes". 

So it does indeed look like Midjourney is aiming to build some kind of real-time open world holodeck in 2024! 

In a follow-up, I asked Holz if Midjourney advisor (and Second Life founder) Philip Rosedale is involved in this effort. Will further update this post if that's also confirmed! I've also amended the original post title accordingly.

Original post (first published 4:33pm PT) below: 

I've reached out to official channels to confirm this (or not), but according to some attendees (as here and here), Midjourney CEO David Holz made a pretty amazing announcement during the startup's open office hours earlier this week.

Specifically, he apparently suggested Midjourney is preparing to deploy a metaverse platform of some kind.

As attendee Nick St. Pierre on Twitter/X quotes Holz:

[H]e thinks they “can get to the holodeck” by 2024.

“We’re gonna build a lot of stuff this year. I think we’ll build more stuff than I’ve ever built before…By the end of 2024 hopefully we have real-time open worlds.”

Normally I would be instantly skeptical about this as hearsay or a misinterpretation. For one thing, while Midjourney outputs 2D images and video, creating a dynamic, immersive virtual world isn't simply a matter of generating 3D graphics, for reasons explained here.

But here's the thing: Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is a lead advisor at Midjourney.

He's listed as such on the startup's hompage. But this may be a coincidence, of course, and Holz's comments this week might have been mischaracterized; hopefully I get some kind of official reply on this.

Midjourney CEO in office hours just said he thinks they “can get to the holodeck” by 2024 😳

“We’re gonna build a lot of stuff this year. I think we’ll build more stuff than I’ve ever built before…By the end of 2024 hopefully we have real-time open worlds”

Holy shit

— Nick St. Pierre (@nickfloats) January 3, 2024

And if you attended this week's Midjourney office hours, dear reader, please recount what was said in Comments!

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Comments

[Nadeja]

Consider that the models don't exactly need to create mesh objects to render a 3D environment and items.
This is what was already possible half a year ago with NERFs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31oxj6mcsOM
Also, a different thing, video generators such as the one offered by Pika AI are starting to produce interesting short clips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYGbQpqTYxE
In about another year, by the end of 2024 there is a chance that not only the generation of 3D photo-realistic animations with a prompt would be feasible, but also a constant stream that may be used as a real-time open world. If it doesn't happen by then, it will happen eventually.

[Nadeja]

In Star Trek, a way to start the holodeck simulations was to describe the scenes, the characters and the objects to generate. It would be fun if we will eventually create our avatars the way we create images with Midjourney. And also interactively "I'd like my haircut more elaborate and with flowers, a little more, yes, like that".

[Lex4art]

Totally unexpected, I'm intrigued! Oo

[Tad]

If Phillip Rosedal Is at the helm, I'd be concerned they will be scraping Second Life for their 3D model data. (And possibly VR Chat too). If such a thing is possible, I hope users have a way go protect their work and intellectual property. Sounds scary tbh

[Ryan Schultz]

Ooh, things are getting interesting!