NVIDIA's Covert Protocol tech demo has you become a detective investigating AI Digital Humans

At GDC 2024, NVIDIA presented a new tech demo for a theoretical detective game, Covert Protocol, created in collaboration with Inworld. If you recall NVIDIA's recent AI collabs, which created cyberpunk-style tech demos featuring AI avatars you can interact with, this takes it all one step further. It presents an old-school adventure game where you're talking to characters to solve a mystery in a brand-new way.

In Covert Protocol, you play a private detective and explore a realistic environment, speaking to 'digital humans' as you piece together critical and key information. The game is powered by the Inworld AI Engine, which fully uses NVIDIA ACE (the technology we've been following over the past year) services to ensure that no two playthroughs are the same.

"This level of AI-driven interactivity and player agency opens up new possibilities for emergent gameplay," NVIDIA writes. "Players must think on their feet and adapt their strategies in real-time to navigate the intricacies of the game world."

The demo is also built on Unreal Engine 5, with the characters created with Epic's powerful MetaHuman technology. The environments all look great, too, and undoubtedly employ a range of real-time easy-tracing effects.

Inworld's AI Engine drives the world, with characters given backstories and traits that will influence their AI-generated responses. On top of this, you've NVIDIA ACE, which includes NVIDIA Riva Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and NVIDIA Audio2Face (A2F) for speech and animation.

"The combination of NVIDIA ACE microservices and the Inworld Engine enables developers to create digital characters that can drive dynamic narratives," said Kylan Gibbs, CEO of Inworld AI. "Opening new possibilities for how gamers can decipher, deduce and play."

6

Inworld will release the source code for the Covert Protocol "in the near future," hopefully, we'll be getting a version we can run on a desktop PC with a high-end GeForce RTX GPU. Inworld also hopes that by releasing the source code (which can be injected into Unreal Engine 5), game developers will begin integrating this technology into games currently being developed.