Generated Worlds
When every pixel is yours
In entertainment, every world looks the same. The same heroes, same quests, same endings. Whether you’re in Tokyo or Toledo, you’re watching identical pixels, following identical stories, meeting identical characters.
Six hours in 2013. Seven hours today. Nine for Gen Z. We stare at screens longer each year, trapped in worlds built for millions, not you.
Meta’s Orion AR glasses changed everything for me. A few months ago, I watched the living room transform. Recipes floated above ingredients. Furniture became quest markers. Digital games painted themselves across physical space. I wasn’t watching someone else’s world anymore. This one was being created just for me, responding to my gaze, adapting to my movements.
The pieces seem to finally be converging. Few breadcrumbs thrown in the last few months. Thrive Capital valued A24 at $3.5 billion; Sequoia just led Mubi’s latest round valuing it at $1 billion. Google’s Veo3 generates cinematic video with synchronized audio. Moon Valley raised $53 million from ex-DeepMind talent to build video models. Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs transforms flat images into explorable 3D spaces. Decart and Odyssey create interactive worlds where every pixel responds in real time, turning games into living environments.
These aren’t just tools for better entertainment. They’re the building blocks of infinite worlds, each one generated uniquely for its inhabitant.
Entertainment That Knows You
Each day a new breakthrough shows what’s coming next. Mirage (from the Captions team) already creates lifelike actors who never existed. Entirely new humans with authentic micro-expressions, genuine emotion in their eyes, and natural gestures. These artificial beings look so real viewers can’t distinguish them from actual people.
Combine Mirage’s artificial humans with Odyssey’s explorable worlds and Decart’s real-time generation, and every character adapts personally to you. Want different clothing? The fabric shifts. Prefer another storyline? The narrative branches instantly. Future experiences won’t offer preset choices but genuine agency. You’ll be shaping reality itself.
Combined with memory, entertainment starts to evolve beyond graphics to genuine understanding. Worlds reshape themselves based on your mood, stories sense when you’re losing interest and pivot seamlessly to recapture your attention. The passive viewer becomes an active creator. The line between audience and author disappears.
More Time Than Ever
Technology enables the shift, but the transformation comes from what happens when AI handles execution. Companies already cut customer service staff by 70% using AI agents. Development cycles compress from months to hours. Tasks without human creativity get automated.
When execution automates, human time expands into creativity and experience. We’re not heading toward Wall-E’s chair-bound future; we’re approaching an era of infinitely rich leisure, where humans prioritize what truly matters: connection, creativity, exploration.
The math is compelling. If AI handles even half of current work, we’ll see 20-hour work weeks within a decade. That’s 20 extra hours each week for personalized, transformative experiences. Time itself becomes the canvas for human creativity.
How It Actually Works
Traditional entertainment required massive infrastructure: studios, actors, distribution networks, marketing campaigns. Billions spent before a viewer sees a single frame. The emerging architecture is radically different, built on capabilities impossible five years ago.
At the base, world generation begins. Models like Veo3 instantly create cinematic landscapes, entire universes produced on demand. Mirage generates artificial actors indistinguishable from real humans, available 24/7 without contracts or constraints. Platforms like Odyssey and Decart build responsive environments with realistic physics and meaningful consequences for every action.
The interaction layer, powered by Orion-style AR glasses, makes entertainment spatial and immersive. No more screens constraining your view. Your living room transforms into alien landscapes; your gestures direct narratives. The social layer supports shared experiences without forcing identical content. You engage with your personalized version while others experience theirs, intersecting meaningfully where connection matters most.
Each piece exists today, demonstrated, functional. Their convergence will create a new kind of magic.
Why This Pays Off
“How will this be monetized?” is the wrong question. Compute costs are plummeting exponentially. What cost $100 per hour in GPU time last year costs $10 today. By the time this scales, generating custom entertainment will cost less than streaming pre-made content.
The real inversion is value creation itself. Netflix spends $17 billion annually chasing the median viewer who doesn’t exist. But personalized experiences crafted specifically for you? Infinitely more valuable, vastly cheaper to produce.
We’ll pay for experiences, not mere content. For worlds attuned to us, not mass-market stories. Audiences will pay for experiences crafted specifically for them. Traditional media, built for the masses, can’t match that value.
But People Love Real Experiences
“But post-COVID, everyone rushed back to IRL experiences.”
Yes. That’s the point.
Humans crave authentic connection and shared experiences. The thought of generated worlds triggers something primal—a revulsion at the artificial, a longing for the "real." We imagine soulless AI actors, hollow digital experiences, the death of human creativity.
But AR isn’t replacing these moments. It’s going to enhance them. Imagine concerts where AR layers amplify live performances or sports events enriched by personalized, instant replays. When digital layers integrate naturally into physical experiences, the boundary between real and digital disappears.
The future isn’t digital replacing physical; it’s digital enhancing everything. Your hiking trip becomes an adventure. Your dinner party spawns shared quests. Every moment can layer entertainment without subtracting presence. Digital and physical blend into something new. The old boundaries dissolve.
Your World, Your Rules
Ready Player One imagined a single metaverse everyone escaped to. Wrong. Why have one world when everyone can have infinite worlds? Why share a reality when reality itself becomes generative?
Children born today won’t understand entertainment as passive consumption. They’ll grow up exploring worlds responsive to whispers, characters remembering their choices, stories branching from curiosity itself. “Games,” “movies,” and “experiences” will merge into something we don’t have words for yet. Something like dreaming while awake.
Infrastructure builds itself through market forces. Costs collapse as technology scales. Interfaces improve through millions of interactions. We’re not waiting for entertainment’s future. We’re living in its opening scenes, watching the old world fade as the new one renders into existence.
Ready Player Everyone
Every pixel, generated for you. Every story, unique to your moment. Every character, performing just for your eyes. Not because technology makes it possible, but because human creativity demands nothing less than an infinite canvas.
Ready Player One got it backwards. We don’t need to escape to a digital world. The digital world is coming to us, one generated frame at a time.