Dean Leitersdorf introduces himself over Zoom, then sorts a immediate that makes me really feel like I’ve simply taken psychedelic mushrooms: “wild west, cosmic, Roman Empire, golden, underwater.” He feeds the phrases into an synthetic intelligence mannequin developed by his startup, Decart, which manipulates stay video in actual time.
“I do not know what’s going to occur,” Leitersdorf says with amusing, shortly earlier than remodeling right into a weird, gold-tinged, subaquatic model of Julius Caesar in a poncho.
Leitersdorf already seems a bit wild—lengthy hair tumbling down his again, a pen doing acrobatics in his fingers. As we speak, his on-screen picture oscillates in surreal methods because the mannequin tries to foretell what every new body ought to appear like. Leitersdorf places his arms over his face and is reworked with extra female options. His pen jumps between completely different colours and shapes. He provides extra prompts that take us to new psychedelic realms.
Decart’s video-to-video mannequin, Mirage, is each a formidable feat of engineering and an indication of how AI may quickly shake up the stay streaming trade. Instruments like OpenAI’s Sora can already conjure more and more sensible video footage with a textual content immediate. Mirage now makes it potential to control video in actual time.
On Thursday, Decart is launching a web site and app that lets customers create their very own movies and modify YouTube clips. The web site provides a number of default themes together with “anime”, “Dubai skyline”, “cyberpunk” and “Versailles Palace.” Throughout our interview, Leitersdorf uploads a clip of somebody taking part in Fortnite and the scene transforms from the acquainted Battle Royale world right into a model set underwater.
Decart’s expertise has huge potential for gaming. In November 2024, the corporate demoed a sport referred to as Oasis that used an analogous method to Mirage to generate a playable Minecraft-like world on the fly. Customers might transfer near a texture after which zoom out once more to provide new playable scenes inside the sport.
Manipulating stay scenes in real-time is much more computationally taxing. Decart wrote low-level code to squeeze high-speed calculations out of Nvidia chips to realize the feat. Mirage generates 20 frames per second at 768×432 decision and a latency of 100 milliseconds per body—ok for a decent-quality TikTok clip.
