Forging ahead
Inside the Ubisoft R&D department investigating AI’s potential throughout game development
O
nce upon a time,
Yves
Jacquier
was a research engineer at CERN, working on the world’s largest particle detector as part of the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Since 2004, though, he has been at Ubisoft, rising through IT and production services to found La Forge: a crossdisciplinary R&D department with the goal of bridging the gap between academic research and videogame production. Where once we might have expected major game publishers to guard their technical innovations jealously, this is becoming increasingly common practice: Electronic Arts, for example, has its own equivalent called SEED. When La Forge was founded at Ubisoft Montreal in 2016, though, it was among the first of its kind.
Last year, the publisher expanded La Forge, introducing teams to its offices in Toronto, Shanghai, Chengdu and Bordeaux. The company claims that more than 90 technology prototypes have been developed by these teams, 42 of which have made it into Ubisoft’s games, and the group is behind around 25 academic publications in the field of AI and machine learning. Jacquier says that, although his group has worked on a range of topics, AI is one area to which it has dedicated considerable time.