Artificial intelligence image generation platform MidJourney is working on a new 3D, video, real-time creation model that will be able to simulate the entire world.

Details were revealed as part of a recent "office hour" on Discord where company leadership answered user questions about the future of the platform.

Rumors have been circulating for some time that MidJourney is expanding beyond images, which would seem to suggest that the new movement is firmly focused on creating a world model.

While they have been creating new models, they have been adding and upgrading other features such as image descriptions and consistent characters.

The exact nature of this is unclear, but the company suggests it will be an "open world sandbox" - a virtual environment where people can build video games and shoot movies.

MidJourney was founded in 2022 by David Holz, a self-described serial entrepreneur.

The first open beta was released in July of that year, with rapid iterations and upgrades over the next year, culminating in the release of the most powerful v6 model last December. 13]

MidJourney has been a leader in the development of a web interface for some high-intensity users who web interface, but remains stubbornly internal to Discord as a way to create and interact with images using its model. 15]

Work has already begun on training a seventh version of MidJourney's image model, which will be released in the fall of 2012, Holtz told Discord users that 3D generation may arrive before video,

and that the 3D model will be used to create the next version of the model.

It makes some sense that dimensionality is part of the focus. One of Holtz's former startups was Leap Motion, a company that developed sensors for tracking hand and finger movements in VR.

"We are really trying to get to a simulation of the world," he said on Discord. 'We're building 3D mid-journey, video MJ, real-time MJ.'

He added that all of this together makes a world simulation. The goal, he said, is to build each of these three elements independently and work on ways to integrate them.

"It will be like a sandbox," he explained. In it people will make video games, people will make movies, but the goal is to build an open world sandbox," he added.

On the surface, this sounds like a modern interpretation of the metaverse. The idea is that in a series of fully interconnected virtual environments, people can perform their daily tasks, earn money, and have fun.

But it sounds more like a new way to create any type of content, including generating entire virtual environments where future science fiction films could be shot without having to use VFX tools to create every element at great cost.

MidJourney's vision of a sandbox by Holtz is more similar to some of the ideas that Roblox is advocating for its developer studio.

The company recently unveiled a new texture and avatar generator, and in a conversation with studio head Stefano Corazza, we were told that the AI plans to generate entire environments from text prompts.