# From Virtual Games to Real-World Play

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18901 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18901/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [VBench: Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17982/) (2023)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [AnimateDiff: Animate Your Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion Models without Specific Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04725/) (2023)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Genie: Generative Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15391/) (2024)
- [First Order Motion Model for Image Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00196/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [VideoCrafter2: Overcoming Data Limitations for High-Quality Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09047/) (2024)
- [VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19512/) (2023)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [One Step Diffusion via Shortcut Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12557/) (2024)
- [Pyramidal Flow Matching for Efficient Video Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05954/) (2024)
- [OpenVid-1M: A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset for Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02371/) (2024)
- [Latent Action Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11758/) (2024)
- [Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Atari](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12399/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14837/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [WorldPlay: Towards Long-Term Geometric Consistency for Real-Time Interactive World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14614/) (2025)
- [Training Agents Inside of Scalable World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24527/) (2025)
- [DreamDojo: A Generalist Robot World Model from Large-Scale Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06949/) (2026)
- [Spatia: Video Generation with Updatable Spatial Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.15716/) (2025)
- [Memorize When Needed: Decoupled Memory Control for Spatially Consistent Long-Horizon Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18215/) (2026)
- [Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression with Long-Context Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00877/) (2025)
- [From Pixels to States: Rethinking Interactive World Models as Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14076/) (2026)
- [CustomX: Unified Character, Action, and Scene Customization in Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17796/) (2025)
- [Code Plans, Diffusion Renders: Open-Ended Generative World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26458/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce RealPlay, a neural network-based real-world game engine that enables interactive video generation from user control signals. Unlike prior works focused on game-style visuals, RealPlay aims to produce photorealistic, temporally consistent video sequences that resemble real-world footage. It operates in an interactive loop: users observe a generated scene, issue a control command, and receive a short video chunk in response. To enable such realistic and responsive generation, we address key challenges including iterative chunk-wise prediction for low-latency feedback, temporal consistency across iterations, and accurate control response. RealPlay is trained on a combination of labeled game data and unlabeled real-world videos, without requiring real-world action annotations. Notably, we observe two forms of generalization: (1) control transfer-RealPlay effectively maps control signals from virtual to real-world scenarios; and (2) entity transfer-although training labels originate solely from a car racing game, RealPlay generalizes to control diverse real-world entities, including bicycles and pedestrians, beyond vehicles. Project page can be found: https://wenqsun.github.io/RealPlay/