Any Game, Any Artistic Style: Google Stadia Brings Style Transfer ML

When Google announced the Google Stadia, their cloud based game streaming platform, it was met with excitement from gamers. But it wasn’t only good news for gamers; developers will also benefit from Stadia thanks to its Style Transfer ML.

Style Transfer is a technology that matches brings a particular artistic style to your photo or video. For example, if you want to bring a rustic look to your selfies, you might look up what a professional photographer did and apply that style to your selfie using Style Transfer. Adobe teased this in 2017 and photo apps have come out since employing this technology.

Google is bringing this technology to the video gaming realm. What that means is that developers can bring in colors, textures, artistic styles and more almost instantaneously into their world. Instead of having to spend hours trying to recreate the impressionistic wonder of Van Gogh’sStarry Night, for example, developers can simple use Style Transfer ML to recreate the same atmosphere for their games.

As a Google representative said at their demo, “We’re doing our part to empower the artist in every developer… What excites us and some of partners so far is how many playable art styles we can create just by feeding it more and more images.”

It is unclear whether or not new styles can be rendered at the user’s discretion, but for the developers, this will be a powerful new tool to create more immersive worlds. The sentiment the representative closed with perfectly encapsulates the power of Style Transfer ML: “It empowers our artists to get the visions in their heads into interactive environments in a whole new way.”

We look forward to seeing just how developers and creators use this new technology!