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 synthetic intelligence mannequin developed by his startup, Decart, which manipulates reside video in actual time.
“I don’t know what’s going to occur,” Leitersdorf says with fun, shortly earlier than remodeling 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 speak, his on-screen picture oscillates in surreal methods because the mannequin tries to foretell what every new body ought to appear to be. Leitersdorf places his fingers 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 would possibly quickly shake up the reside streaming trade. Instruments like OpenAI’s Sora can already conjure more and more reasonable video footage with a textual content immediate. Mirage now makes it doable 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 know-how has massive potential for gaming. In November 2024, the corporate demoed a recreation known as Oasis that used an identical strategy to Mirage to generate a playable Minecraft-like world on the fly. Customers may transfer near a texture after which zoom out once more to provide new playable scenes inside the sport.
Manipulating reside scenes in actual 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.
