Google's just begun opening up access to an AI model I can actually get behind. This one lets you generate a virtual world of any kind and travel through it with a vehicle or character like in a video game – all with text prompts or images you upload.
That could be a spaceship flying over an alien planet, a blimp over a European city set in the 1950s drawing from a photo, or an tapir running through far reaches of the Amazon rainforest. It's all in a web app called Project Genie, which you can access with a Google Ultra account in the US provided you're above age 18.
This app is based on the Genie 3 model that Google showed off back in August 2025, when it was only available to a limited set of testers. This one uses the company's Nano Banana Pro image generation model as well as Gemini to turn your text prompts into immersive experiences.
The idea is for you to traverse freely through whatever environment you can dream up, interact with objects in it, and even observe reactive phenomena like the map on a GPS navigation device update as you turn in different directions.
These models generate frames for your virtual world on the fly, based on how you make your character move around and adjust the camera. It's neat that you can upload your own images – whether that's a character you've drawn, or a photo of an object in the real world – to use in your experience, and even dictate how some elements will interact with each other. In the promo video above, you can see a compelling example where a blue ball 'paints' everything it rolls over as it makes its way through a field of white grass. There's also a library of worlds you can remix and get started quickly.
YouTuber Bilawal Sidhu interviewed Jack Parker-Holder and Diego Rivas from the team behind Project Genie at Google DeepMind, and noted in some live examples how there were occasional bugs from time to time, and the restriction to just 60 seconds of walkthrough time is a major limitation at the moment.
That said, there's plenty to be excited about here. The team hasn't yet defined exactly what use cases this will be best suited for, but believe it'll likely come in handy for quickly prototyping video game concepts, visualizing scenes and set pieces for filmmaking, and bringing ideas to life in the classroom.
One compelling example in the education space that Parker-Holder and Rivas described was allowing students to get a sense of what working in different professions might be like, such as assisting in disaster recovery. The fact that these applications are all immediately accessible to people without the need for specialized training is quite something.
The developers say the Genie model can evolve to allow for more control over generated environments from users' inputs, including actions that your character can take as they explore. They're also looking into enabling worlds to persist for more than 60 seconds, and they'll continue to listen to user feedback to understand what capabilities to invest effort into building next.
I haven't gotten a chance to try it from my current base in India yet, but I'm excited to give this a go when it becomes more broadly available, especially to see what elements and interactions it enables on its own when I enter prompts based on real-world spaces. I'm also curious to learn how Google builds guardrails to prevent Project Genie from being misused to generate harmful and inappropriate content, and what systems it'll have in place to prevent copyright infringement.
If you're in the US and have a Google AI Ultra subscription, you can check out Project Genie right away.
Source: Google
