Roblox to Launch on PlayStation, Introduce AI-Powered World-Building Tools
Gaming company Roblox plans to launch an immersive digital world platform for Sony’s PlayStation devices in October, giving it access to the hundreds of millions of people who use the world’s most popular game console.
Roblox is also making its app fully available for Meta’s Quest mixed devices this month, after releasing a beta version in July. This version was downloaded over a million times in five days, the company said in a blog post.
The extension is part of a plan to make Roblox available “wherever users try to use it,” including mobile, desktop and augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) devices, Roblox chief product officer Manuel Bronstein told Reuters ahead of the company’s annual launch . developer conference this week.
“I wonder if we should be on every TV,” Bronstein said.
With 66 million daily users, most of them teenagers, Roblox is one of the most popular gaming services for kids, and tech giants like Meta are watching closely as they try to attract the next generation of users.
Meta’s similar “metaverse” service Horizon, where users posing as avatars can congregate in virtual spaces, has struggled to achieve similar momentum. According to a Wall Street Journal report, it had less than 200,000 monthly users as of last year.
Horizon is currently only available in VR, though Meta said in February that it plans to release web and mobile versions soon, without a date.
At its conference, Roblox announced plans to launch a world-building chatbot powered by artificial intelligence by the end of the year.
According to a demo shown to Reuters, developers can use the chatbot — which closely resembles a tool previewed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year — to create virtual objects and scenes on command without coding.
Meta’s technology, which it has yet to release, used voice commands instead of written chat.
Another new Roblox tool to be released later this year would allow mobile or desktop users to make voice calls with Roblox friends who appear as avatars.
The technology, called Connect, records the participant’s facial expressions and body movements using the device’s camera and then displays it through the person’s Avatar.
