Project: Arrival Launches Closed Beta Session For One Week

Indie developer and publisher Nuverse announced they have launched a Closed Beta session for Project: Arrival to run for the next week. From now until May 2nd, select players in the United Kingdom and Canada will be able to test out the sci-fil mobile title which has been set on a post-apocalyptic world after the interstellar war started by an alien civilization. You’ll be playing as the survivors from that war trying to carve out a piece of the planet for yourself in the game’s futuristic world, where every day is doomsday. One of the big things that the devs are hyping about the game and the beta is how it’s integrated with NVIDIA’s AI and Omniverse, in which they’ve “given birth” to an intelligent character, Lydia. You can read more about that project below and check out a trailer featuring the character.

First revealed in August 2021, Project: Arrival is set in a post-apocalyptic world after the interstellar war brought about by an alien civilization. Players will take on the role as survivors in this futuristic world, and must fight for survival on the doomsday Earth. As players survive the harsh environment, they’ll pick up the pieces of civilization and build a home for survivors, while fending off aliens and mutant creatures with high-tech weapons. Launching globally on mobile devices, the game merges survival, exploration, action and crafting on the backdrop of a science-fiction setting.

To create a high-end gameplay experience, Nuverse turned to NVIDIA’s AI and simulation technologies to create Lydia, a GPU-powered intelligent, hyper-realistic digital human. As the AI companion of Project: Arrival, Lydia will accompany players to explore the wasteland after the invasion of extraterrestrial beings, and respond to all kinds of questions during the journey. Created by NVIDIA Omniverse, a 3D design collaboration and simulation platform, Lydia comes to life by leveraging deep learning and animation technology  to offer a more realistic experience for players.

Lydia used the latest technology from NVIDIA to create an optimised, interactive character in a matter of months. NVIDIA Omniverse allows developers to connect a character model with AI models for text-to-speech along with chatbot functionality. Nuverse reduced its training time to a matter of days with NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face, which generates realistic facial animation from just an audio track, and NVIDIA AI. Model training for text-to-speech took just two days and the chatbot model took only five days, using more than 10 terabytes of training data.