[xouse]

I think applications of AI to creating 3d modeling assets for videogames. Gaming is a >100 billion dollar industry and art can be as much as half of costs for AAA games. It seems to me like it's the lowest hanging fruit of AI in terms of difficulty vs potential revenue.

[patrickk]

A (related) example is upscaling graphics on older games using AI:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-alg...

https://www.reddit.com/r/GameUpscale/top/?sort=top&t=all

[saiya-jin]

MS Flight Simulator 2020 seems to be doing this - creating 3D maps of all structures/trees/etc out of normal Bing world flat maps. Not sure how much human touch is required afterwards, but if those early videos are representative then damn that's amazing and brings realism never seen before

[Cthulhu_]

That's one example, another one is for smaller assets - trees and vegetation, for example (SpeedTree). There's definitely a market for creating 3rd party tooling to help with developing a game. There's actually quite a few companies and technologies that specialize in one aspect of a game or game's world.

There's a few other interesting technologies that add a lot of content to a game for relatively small investments; think physics and destruction engines, animation technology (iirc there is something developed by EA's sports games branch that can generate intermediate animations for smooth animation transitions), world generation (height maps), etc.