Most of our inspirations began as something much smaller than a world. A single image, a historical reference, a line from a book, or even the mood after watching a good movie scene. Prior to Untersea many of these fleeting moments would be lost before we could properly grab them.
Even with this tool, our approach remains holistic. A narrative can’t be built all at once. First we ask what makes that feeling interesting. What was there? Who is there? What just happened? What is about to happen? What should the player notice first, and what should they only discover if they keep looking?
Once the feeling starts growing into space, through architecture, geography, light, sound, weather, and clutter, that is where Untersea’s technology comes in to fill the gaps. AI makes it possible to move quickly from an initial concept into a navigable 3D environment, then keep refining it as new ideas emerge. The goal is not simply to generate a scene, but to develop one: to take a fragment of imagination and give it enough depth, specificity, and atmosphere that someone else can enter it and begin exploring.
This is to say nothing of the possibilities that this technology allows. As we started with, inspiration can come from any source. If someone can imagine it we can model it. The founders came together over a table top game working in the Theater of the Mind, and we hope to take the stories we told together and expand them out into environments and narratives that everyone can step into, be it a trading post at the edge of the unknown; a Cambrian pool teeming with unfamiliar life; a Napoleonic port town caught between commerce and war; a childhood home; a dirt road threading through the Khyber pass.