NCSoft launches VARCO Studio, genAI platform with various models for creating texts, images, and digital humans

NCSoft is stepping into the AI field by announcing a set of in-house language models to optimize game development. The South Korean publisher is now offering a one-month free trial to users across the globe.

VARCO Art

What is VARCO?

• On August 16, NCSoft released VARCO (stands for “Via AI, Realize your Creativity & Originality”), a collection of large language models that can be used to create different AI tools and services.
• “The LLMs operated under VARCO can be classified into four categories: Foundation, Prompt, Dialogue, and Generative models,” NCSoft explained. “The performance of the models in each of the categories depends on the size of their parameters.”
• Right now, VARCO is available on the Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart as a one-month free trial. More details and instructions on how to deploy the model can be found on GitHub.
• The initial launch only includes small- and medium-sized LLMs for Korean launguage, but the company plans to introduce a Korean-English bilingual model later this month.

What AI tools does VARCO include?

Using its LLMs, NCSoft intrdouced VARCO Studio, a generative AI platform for creating various content and improving “efficiency in different fields of game development such as game design and art.”

VARCO Studio currently includes three services:

• VARCO Art — a text-to-image generation tool with a “text wizard” that helps with writing the right prompts (generated images can the be edited, and the dataset is trained on NCSoft’s IP);
• VARCO Text — a text generation and management tool (it should help devs generate game texts, dialogues, and general documents;
• VARCO Human — a tool for creating, editing, and managing digital humans (there are various presets available, but users can also make their own persona by manually modifying parameters).

VARCO Human

In the future, NCSoft plans to bring “domain-specific models that combine cutting-edge AI technology with the expertise of various partners from different fields — ranging from education to finance and biotechnology.”

To showcase the work of VARCO Studios, the company also posted a YouTube video (with English subtitles).