Minecraft remains remarkably popular a decade or so after it was first released, thanks to a unique mix of quirky gameplay and open world building possibilities.
A knock-off called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the original game’s flavor with a remarkable and weird twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that dreams up each frame.
Oasis was built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched, a company that designs custom silicon, to demonstrate the potential of hardware optimized to power transformer-based AI algorithms.
Oasis uses a transformer AI model, similar to the one that powers a large language model—only trained, apparently, on endless examples of people playing Minecraft, to dream up each new video frame in response to the previous one and to user input like clicks or mouse moves. Oasis is similar to a video-generating model like Sora except a user can control its output.
You can play Oasis online for free, and it is both fascinating and surreal to explore. Besides harboring bizarre artifacts, like misshapen livestock and stairs that go nowhere, the game has an amazing, Inception-like quality. Because each frame is generated based on what the AI model imagines should come after the frame it currently sees, the in-game world is never entirely stable, and will gladly shift and morph with a little nudging. If you stare too closely at a texture, for example, when you look up again, the block world in front of you may be completely different from the one you last saw.
