Make a video game where you play as your own cat in Google's new virtual world creator

There’s no denying that generative AI can produce some impressive results, and while it’s easy to see that success and imagine some even grander possibilities, actually distilling all that promise down into an easy-to-use, reliable tool can prove particularly challenging. Last year, Google showed off its Genie 3 world-building engine — give it a prompt, and it could create realistic scenes, ready to explore. And now it’s finally your chance to try this magic out for yourself, as Google launches Project Genie.

Project Genie works a lot like tools you’re already familiar with, and even taps into Nano Banana Pro. You can describe a world you’d like it to create, offer directions about the artistic style the output should take, and even upload media you’d like it to take inspiration from. After previewing that with a sketch, you can further refine exactly how this world should take shape.

You’re also going to need an avatar to move around in your Project Genie world, and you can similarly specify exactly what form that should take — an object, animal, person; whatever you like. And once you make all these choices, you can start using your avatar to explore your brand-new world. If you ever wanted to see what it was like to move around the world as your pet dog or cat, now’s your chance.

It may not be a proper video game you end up with (at least not one with any goals), but if you love software that just leaves you free to explore interesting environments, this sounds like the sort of thing that’s going to be right up your alley.

Alright, enough hype: There’s also a big catch here. If Project Genie’s capabilities have so far sounded pretty astounding to you, there’s good reason for that, as building worlds like this is hugely complicated. And as a result, right now it’s all locked behind Google’s highest-tier AI paywall — you need the $250/month Google AI Ultra plan to use Project Genie.

While Google acknowledges that it still has work to do here, improving things like physics and refining the approach to world generation, we just can’t ignore how much fun this already looks. You can keep remixing worlds, or generating random changes, helping things stay exciting and fresh. Hopefully this eventually gets to a point where Google lowers the bar for entry, because our jealousy is already palpable.