Learning layout generation for virtual worlds

Abstract The emergence of the metaverse has led to the rapidly increasing demand for the generation of extensive 3D worlds. We consider that an engaging world is built upon a rational layout of multiple land-use areas (e.g., forest, meadow, and farmland). To this end, we propose a generative model of land-use distribution that learns from geographic data. The model is based on a transformer architecture that generates a 2D map of the land-use layout, which can be conditioned on spatial and semantic controls, depending on whether either one or both are provided. This model enables diverse layout generation with user control and layout expansion by extending borders with partial inputs. To generate high-quality and satisfactory layouts, we devise a geometric objective function that supervises the model to perceive layout shapes and regularize generations using geometric priors. Additionally, we devise a planning objective function that supervises the model to perceive progressive composition demands and suppress generations deviating from controls. To evaluate the spatial distribution of the generations, we train an autoencoder to embed land-use layouts into vectors to enable comparison between the real and generated data using the Wasserstein metric, which is inspired by the Fréchet inception distance.