Cybever bets on AI to reconstruct 3D world creation

When Cecilia Shen co-founded Cybever in 2022, the process of creating a virtual world remained a largely labor-intensive challenge. Generic AI was already transforming text and image creation, but the 3D environment remained a stubbornly complex challenge. Shen and her team believed there was a better approach. It not only generates content, but also leverages AI to deepen understanding and construct physics, spatial relationships, and movement. Now, Cybever claims it can reduce game development time by up to 70%.

Shen’s vision was to ensure that users have the entire 3D world existed in several words. Instead of painstakingly using each element, the creator can download a basic city and instruct Cybever’s AI to convert it to New York, San Francisco, or another environment. The platform reskins the buildings and adapts them accordingly.

But Cybever’s ambitions go beyond static worldbuilding. Future video generation capabilities allow the platform to build videos within an interactive 3D environment, allowing real-time control over scene composition, object placement, movement and lighting. By leveraging structured 3D data and AI-driven extensions, authors can use fast 3D previews to iterate more efficiently before generating high-quality final output.

Cybever’s system parses scripts into structured storyboards and maps important moments before generating a fully editable 3D environment. One of the biggest challenges of AI-generated videos is to maintain smooth movement and stylistic consistency. Cybever addresses this through video-to-video translation using 3D video inputs and trains AI models that produce fluid, stylistically consistent output. This structured approach allows creators to retain control while benefiting from AI-supported production speeds.

Cybever is not another AI content generator. The goal is to bridge the gap between creating AI support and the practical controls industry experts demand. While some AI tools produce unpredictable results, Cybever is designed to provide structure and accuracy, allowing users to change their environment without starting from scratch. “We want professional creators to have control over what happens in the environment,” Shen explained. “They can make changes, they can edit, they can be exchanged, they can be done a lot.”

The market for AI-assisted 3D content creation is growing rapidly. Valued at over $200 billion, the gaming industry is increasingly relying on procedural generation to reduce costs and accelerate production. Hollywood is also exploring AI to streamline visual effects and prerequisites. Beyond entertainment, sectors such as architecture, urban planning and robotics are investing in AI-driven simulations. Cybever aims to serve all of these industries by providing a scalable and adaptable platform.

Before launching Cybever, Shen built Robotics and AI expertise in Google’s X Lab, where he worked on a Moonshot project, including Robotics for farming. She quickly saw that one of the biggest challenges of robotics, a structured understanding of the environment of machines, is also a major hurdle in the creation of digital content. With that realization, she found Cybever and applied AI technology from robotics to 3D worldbuilding.

The founding team at Cybever brings together experience from games, AI research and large-scale simulations. CTO Jie Yang specializes in machine learning applications for spatial computing, while other team members have backgrounds from major game studios and visual effects companies. Their collective experience allows them to build AI models that integrate seamlessly with industry standard tools such as Unreal Engine and Unity.

Cybever is not alone in this space. World Labs, the biggest competitor founded by Professor Stanford and AI researcher FEI-FEI LI, has raised significantly more capital to develop AI-driven 3D world creation tools. Unlike Cybever, which prioritizes a structured physical recognition environment, World Labs focuses on generating 3D scenes from text. However, Shen sees these approaches as complementary rather than directly competitive. “Our goal is to provide industry experts with tools they can trust and control, rather than AI who wants to spit out the scene and do well,” she said.

Shen envisions a future where AI-created 3D worlds can be generated as easily as text documents. Looking ahead, she sees applications beyond entertainment, including robotics, self-driving cars, and digital twins for real-world infrastructure. The challenges remain, but especially balancing automation and user control is betting that structured AI rather than pure generation is the key to unleashing the next wave of 3D content creation.

For now, Cybever is focused on refinement of its tools and expanding its customer base. The combination of AI automation and structured worldbuilding will help the company hope to carve out a lasting role in the evolving landscape of virtual environments.