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 a man-made intelligence mannequin developed by his startup, Decart, which manipulates dwell video in actual time.
“I do not know what’s going to occur,” Leitersdorf says with fun, shortly earlier than reworking right into a weird, gold-tinged, subaquatic model of Julius Caesar in a poncho.
Leitersdorf already appears a bit wild—lengthy hair tumbling down his again, a pen doing acrobatics in his fingers. As we discuss, his onscreen picture oscillates in surreal methods because the mannequin tries to foretell what every new body ought to appear to be. Leitersdorf places his arms over his face and is remodeled with extra female options. His pen jumps between totally 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 powerful feat of engineering and an indication of how AI would possibly quickly shake up the livestreaming business. Instruments like OpenAI’s Sora can conjure more and more lifelike 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 can enable customers to create their very own movies and modify YouTube clips. The web site presents 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 know-how has massive potential for gaming. In November 2024, the corporate demoed a sport referred to as Oasis that used an identical strategy 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 supply new playable scenes inside the sport.
Manipulating dwell scenes in actual time is much more computationally taxing. Decart wrote low-level code to squeeze high-speed calculations out of Nvidia chips to attain 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.
