Your daily dose of tech and game news has been interrupted with an interesting but nerdy adventure from the depths of the IIT Bombay campus. Back in 2019 Ubisoft India set up an R&D unit in IIT Bombay but had to shift it back to their Powai office because of covid. Now the collab is back on track and so are the projects that were being worked on by IIT Bombay students.
The ongoing and completed projects involve problem-solving in the development phase for Ubisoft games through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Think of auto bug detection systems that navigate set paths and weed out smaller bugs, defect detection systems and image tracking systems that automate and police bugs throughout the game development process and you’ll understand how the R&D unit brings value to Ubisoft. You won’t find a measly ‘you will get exposure’ letter from Ubisoft here. More than 30+ students have been hired by Ubisoft since the inception of the R&D unit and there are around four more projects in the pipeline. Needless to say, this is not a leap of faith but a calculated ambition to make AI watch dogs…
Upcoming projects like creating automated detection systems to censor and block any player communication that goes against community guidelines and harms the safe space for all online gamers will involve students and IIT Bombay faculty members as well. There’s even a project for converting 2D images into 3D through AI and ML systems but that’s more to do with the developer side of content creation (internal tool) rather than the in-game character creation for players.
You may not be able to physically see the efforts of these projects from the minds of IIT Bombay students but hopefully, you’ll see their implementation in the upcoming games soon enough. Game balancing could also be there on the list.