star trek computer noise

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The Soundscape for Science Fiction fans

Star Trek's Enterprise engine noise has been a recurring request. A slight problem delayed its release: our user interface had more sliders than it needed to recreate the sound! ;) So, instead of designing just an engine noise, we decided to throw some extra sounds and turn the engine noise into a fully featured intergalactic experience. This soundscape has all the background noises needed to immerse yourself in a classic Sci-Fi movie soundtrack. For the TOS fans, we even added those fluttery vintage synth tones, reminiscent of how the future was perceived like... back in the sixties!

If you plan to listen to the soundscape for more than 24 hours in a row - there is a YouTube Video that has the engine sound playing for a full day - make sure to turn the Animate feature on! If you are after that exact same sound as the video - only without the YouTube distortion - try our White Noise generator instead, and this particular Star Trek Ambient Engine Noise setting.

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Star Trek Computer sounds

If you are a Star Trek fan or love sound effects, this clips are for you! Hear the brilliantly futuristic sound effects of computers that were created by some of the best sound editors of that time.

Category: Television    Tracks: 15    Views: 145618   

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Get Yourself Star Trek Computer Sounds

Star Trek fans are usually technology fanatics. This stems from the fact that if you grew up when any "generation" of Star Trek episode was on, then you quickly became obsessed with the cool gadgets that the Star Trek crew carried and used throughout the ship (or on planets). Now that the world has progressed with tremendous technological advancements, many of those technologies are now a reality. Just last week, I had my temperature scanned with a probe that the nurse simply ran across my forehead. I had to double check to make sure I hadn't just entered the Enterprise sick bay. And then, I grinned... Star Trek is here.

Unfortunately, when it comes to our cell phones and computers, the cool sounds that came along with those old Trek gadgets simply never became a reality. Our computers beep and alert using all of the standard operating system sounds, our phones ring or buzz in various ringtones - but what ever happened to those cool Star Trek sound effects that our "communicators" are supposed to have? We've achieved some of the Tricorder technology with our GPS gadgets but where are the metallic beeps and chirps?  MakeUseOf has always offered some of the best sound resources for readers, such as a FindSounds , or a review of the Soungle - free sound effects website . While Star Trek sounds are certainly hard to find and exist only in some of the most obscure places on the Internet - today, I offer MakeUseOf readers a few useful sources for Star Trek computer sounds.

Finding Star Trek Computer Sounds

If you've been a Trekkie for years, or you just became a new member of the Trekkie community after the last film, you've probably learned pretty quickly that finding funky sounds for your mobile phone or your computer isn't exactly the easiest task in the world. If you perform a Google search, you'll quickly discover that most of the best files are buried deep in someone's web server archive. For some reason, many of the Star Trek fans don't seem to be the most advanced webmasters, so quite a few of these sites are hard to navigate. The following list offers some of the coolest Star Trek computer sounds, movie effects and even audio quotes that most Star Trek fans will immediately recognize from their favorite Star Trek generation. Without further ado, let's "Make it so."

Pimp Out Your Mobile Phone with Star Trek

While most folks go to the Next Pimp website to pimp out their phone with various hip-hop ringtones from Beyoncé or Justin Timberlake, Trek fans can go to the Star Trek page to download from a list of ten very cool Star Trek computer sound effects.

These are mostly a collection of various short computer sound effects from the various Star Trek series. One of my favorites is the Torpedo; but dooropen, Communicator and Incoming Message are also great for different functions of a Windows Mobile device, like an incoming email message or an appointment due. There aren't many options for ringtones here, but when you're done downloading all of these sound effect, your phone will be transformed into a device that will probably turn a few heads.

Composer Juan Portela Shares His Love of Star Trek

While digging through various forums and obscure web sites for some of the best Star Trek sound effects, I came across a link to a ZIP file, hidden within the website of composer Juan Portela.  Oddly, I couldn't find a single link to this file from his actual site, but the link from a forum post worked great. Clicking on the link will immediately open the ZIP file. After extracting it, you'll have a selection of 9 awesome "alert" sound effect files that you can use to totally trick out your PC's various sounds such as errors, email messages, just about anything else.

I've used a few of these on my own computer - I think in terms of Star Trek computer sounds for various Windows alert events, this collection is perfect.  These are essentially various sound files which Juan edited mostly from the airlock sounds. I've set all of my appointment settings to use these sound files whenever an alarm is due, and I still grin every time it goes off. After a while, you'll feel like you're living in the middle of your favorite Star Trek episode.

Download Star Trek Ringtones from CellSea

Personally, I've found the best mobile phone ringtones and sound effects just by doing a search for "Star Trek" on CellSea . Just a few examples from the list of free ringtones available there include the Enterprise computer voice saying "Command Functions are offline," a ringtone made from communicator beeps, and even one made from the Star Trek TNG main theme song.

After listening to the Star Trek TNG and experiencing a lot of great childhood memories flooding back - it's now my new mobile ringtone. This assumes that you can use MP3 ringtones on your phone, as that is the format of most of these.  Obviously, since they are MP3 files, you can use all of these awesome Star Trek sound files for your computer sound effects as well.

Hundreds of Star Trek Computer Sounds at the SoundBoard

SoundBoard is probably one of the best sources for Star Trek sounds that I've seen. A search for "Star Trek" at SoundBoard results in two pages of results. Each of those results features about a dozen tracks or so of some of the best Star Trek sound bites or sound effects that you'll find anywhere.

The SoundBoard features this very cool player that lets you test out all of the tracks within each category before you download it to your computer.

If you're looking for Star Trek WAV files, a fan from the UK created a "Matt's Movie Sounds" page, and there's an entire collection of over fifty audio quotes from the original series as well as The Next Generation. Another obscure source of Star Trek sounds is Frank's Radio , where there's a directory of over 100 Star Trek WAV files that include computer responses, beeps, sound effects and quotes.

Do you know of any other valuable resources for Star Trek sounds? Share them with other Trekkies in the comments section below!

Read This: The story behind Star Trek ’s iconic, ceaseless sound effects

Very few programs in television history can be easily identified by their sound effects alone. The original 1966-69 run of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek belongs in that select fraternity, thanks to the efforts of sound mixer Doug Grindstaff and other craftsmen who toiled on the classic science-fiction series, setting the tone for the multimedia franchise to come. The sound effects on Star Trek are as cool as they are relentless. This is, in short, a noisy version of space exploration. Despite the supposed lack of oxygen in the vast reaches of the cosmos, the onslaught of beeps, bleeps, pings, clicks, and whooshes never really stops during the average Trek episode. And that’s wholly by design. Over at Audible Range , having interviewed Grindstaff and other experts on the topic, writer Mark Altman has assembled a revealing historical article entitled “ Kittens, Kisses, And Razorblades: Behind Star Trek ’s Iconic Sounds .” Here, to set the proper mood, is some genuine LBJ-era Trek ambiance.

According to the article, the show had “wall-to-wall sound effects” because Roddenberry wanted it that way. Cacophony was very much part of the Star Trek brand. In those early days, the TV series did not have the budget to compete with feature films, so sound effects helped create the illusion that scenes were taking place on strange alien worlds. Roddenberry wasn’t aiming for realism but drama. So committed was Roddenberry to this idea that he even had Grindstaff add a sound effect to a scene in which Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) administers a shot. “Gene Roddenberry wanted to paint the whole show like you were painting a picture,” Grindstaff explains.

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Some tricks of the trade are also revealed here. Composer Alexander Courage, who created the original music for Star Trek , was hugely important in determining how the series would sound, working hand in hand with effects people to create weird, often electronic-based noises. Certain noises, however, were decidedly low-tech. When the Enterprise swooshes across the screen during the opening credits, for instance, that’s Courage himself blowing into a microphone. The sound of the Tribbles, meanwhile, came from doves, while the parasites of “ Operation: Annihilate ” were represented by “sampling about a hundred kisses.” Fascinating, Captain.

Douglas Grindstaff’s Sound Effects for the Original ‘Star Trek’

by Michael Kunkes

The original  Star Trek  series, which ran on NBC from 1966 to 1969, boldly went where no series had gone before in terms of sound effects editing.  The universe of the USS Enterprise was alive with sound, much of it musical in nature: computer banks, phasers, transporters, photon torpedoes, communicators, and alien and creature vocals.  Much of that was due to the singular vision of writer/producer Gene Roddenberry, along with the inventiveness of Douglas H. Grindstaff, who served as the show’s supervising sound effects editor for the entire 80-episode run.

Grindstaff, who entered the industry in 1954 after service in the Korean War, won five Emmy Awards for his television sound work as well as the Motion Picture Sound Editors’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998.  He also headed the sound departments at Paramount Studios, Lorimar Telepictures, Columbia Studios and Pacific Sound before his retirement in 1990.

“When I went to work on the series, Gene described to me what he wanted the Enterprise to sound like,” Grindstaff recalls.  “I asked him if he didn’t think we were getting a little too ‘cartoony’ with the sound effects, and he told me, ‘Doug, I want you to think like an artist and paint everything with sound.’  That’s what he wanted, and that’s why the show sounded the way it did.  He had a very strong vision; you had to give him what he wanted, but you also had to use your own instinct about what should be.  You were either on his wavelength or you weren’t.”

Grindstaff and his crew built their tracks mainly from some material in the Paramount and Desilu sound effects libraries, as well as their own personal libraries.  Additional sounds came from Paramount’s 1953 version of  War of the Worlds .  Sadly, the library he meticulously created, bundled and catalogued is now lost to history.

Working with small TV budgets, Grindstaff maximized what he had.  For example, to create the shimmering, musical sound of the Enterprise transporter, he blended together a few musical effects and electric generator sounds.  Then, on a Moviola, he would create his own fades by shaving the mag sound with a razor blade at the desired point, a technique he learned from the late George Emich, who was Fred Astaire’s music editor at RKO, and who is co-credited with applying the click track to music editing.  “I created my own fades because I didn’t trust the mixers to get it the way I wanted it,” Grindstaff laughed.  “We also did all our own Foley and ADR looping.”

Other sounds were just as inventive.  At Roddenberry’s insistence, each planet visited by the Enterprise had to have its own sound, and for these, Grindstaff would use variations of an orchestra tuning up.  In one legendary episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” Grindstaff used screech-owls, doves and rat “vocals” for the voices of the furry pets, who came aboard the Enterprise and began reproducing at an alarming rate.  “I had to go from a single Tribble to the sounds of thousands of them filling the ship,” he says.  “I ran them backwards and forwards, put them on the variable speeder and edited loops, so I could have multiple tracks and mix them at different levels for different spots in the ship.”

The schedule was brutal.  “You were making things every week, and that was the tough part,” he recalls.  “I’d try and get as much ready as I could a couple of weeks before we got an episode, so that when the show was turned over to the editors, I had the sound effects pretty well set, and could tell them the right spots to put everything.  I also always insisted on having a sound effects editor at every mix.”

Nearly ten years after the Enterprise concluded its five-year mission, Grindstaff was offered a job by Roddenberry on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979).  He turned it down.  “Not long before that, I had gone to see Star Wars , and I flipped out,” he says.  “I just said to myself, ‘Man, we blew it; we should have made a Star Trek movie a lot sooner.’  But I sure intend to go see this one.”  Was he aware that he was creating something entirely new in sci-fi sound effects?  “Hardly; I was too busy working for Gene.”

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Star Trek Sound Effects

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Track listing [ ]

See also [ ].

• Star Trek Generations (soundtrack) , which included 23 tracks of sound effects created for Star Trek Generations .
• Douglas Grindstaff also released 3 Albums titled Star Trek: Classic Sound Effects which are not licensed by Paramount.
• Star Trek: The Original Series Soundtrack Collection CD 5 also contains 10 sound effects which have been used in the show and another 8 unused that haven't.
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Turn Your Computer Into A Star Trek Sound Machine

By charles evans | mar 7, 2017.

These Star Trek background noise videos will turn your computer into a Star Trek sound machine, putting you on the bridge of your favorite starship.

I’m a sucker for a sound machine. I love sitting back, closing my eyes, and listening to the sounds of a babbling brook while I imagine I’m in a sleepy meadow full of sunshine… AND IS THAT A ROMULAN BIRD OF PREY?

Now you can do away with ocean sounds and peaceful valleys and relax where you truly feel most at peace, on a starship. YouTuber Ender4life has created background ambience tracks of all the great Star Trek ships and locations. From the bridge of the NCC-1701 to the bridge of the NCC-1701 D, it’s all here.

Some of his works even have quiet conversations in them. You can just make out that Spock is reporting something to Kirk.

Now you can fulfill that dream of falling asleep while on duty at the helm of a Galaxy Class starship.

It’s not just the bridge though, if you’d like to relax in your quarters you can do that too.

Or maybe you want to visit Ten Forward and have a nice relaxing meal and drink something green?

If Ten Forward isn’t your speed you could always take a turn at the Dabo wheel in Quark’s Bar, Grill, Gamind House, and Holosuite Arcade.

You can even visit a cargo bay to inventory some supplies…

…or pop down to engineering to help Jordy realign the phase converters.

I’m of course partial to the DS9 ops, but I’d love to get a Defiant bridge loop as well.

Hopefully  Ender4life  keeps making these, because they are just fantastic. So far this week I’ve gotten a lot of work done on the bridge of the Enterprise all from the comfort of my office.

NEXT: Star Trek Is The Greatest Science Fiction Franchise Of All Time

What do you think? Are you going to turn your computer into a Stark Trek sound machine? Let us know on  Facebook or in the comments below.

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The avaiable sound effects files were taken directly from the according Star Trek TV series or movies, and from diverse interactive CD-ROM applications or games (Star Trek: TNG Interactive Technical Manual, Star Trek Captain's Chair, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: DS9 Harbinger). All copyrights are the property of their respective holders. Concerning the public use of the files: since the sounds have been reworked and enhanced by the author, I expect credits with link to the Star Trek Dimension at all events.  

© 1999-2000 by Star Trek Dimension / Webmaster . Last update: November 12th, 2000

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Star Trek Beeps, Chirps, and Warbles

Updated aug 14, 2008 by greg morris.

How this work??  Ditto! more than one person has asked this question and now here's a third... me...  .soundpack? windows does not recognize this as a file type, can anyone please explain and expound on this? Thank you so much!

very nice!thank you

Since no one has answered this yet (wow!) I figured it out. You gotta download this: Sound Packager from Stardock

You just made my wife's day thanks. I heard this and was instantly transported to another place. Sorry couldn't help it. Again really well done, thank you.

At last, a package of Trek sounds without the accidental series background noise. Add me to the long list of thoroughly impressed downloaders. Thank you for taking the time to put this together. You made my night!

Thank you, mate ! Star Trek fan here. A happier one starting today !

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Published Jun 27, 2018

The Sound of Their Voices

“When you're on camera, even though you try to lose yourself in the character, you are aware that there is a camera there capturing every moment of it visually. With doing a voiceover job, you are worried about the sound of it, and you have to make all those visual colors come out with your sound.” -- Doug Jones

Many of the most memorable performances in Star Trek ’s history have never been seen. Because of its unique storylines featuring characters in every shape and form – from cosmic clouds to sentient nanites – Star Trek has from its earliest days depended on talented actors to convey emotion and give realism to alien characters using only their voices. These voice actors bring alive some of Trek ’s best allies and adversaries. Let’s explore several favorites.

More than a few TOS voice actors did double-duty in front of the camera as well as in the recording booth. Majel Barrett Roddenberry is a defining example. While her most-iconic roles were Number One and Christine Chapel on TOS and Lwaxana Troi on The Next Generation , she contributed many voiceover performances in nearly every incarnation. Her voice was that of Federation starships in TOS , The Animated Series , TNG , Deep Space Nine , Voyager , and Enterprise , in addition to the 2009 Star Trek Kelvin universe film. Two entertaining moments occur in the episodes “ Manhunt ” and “ Cost of Living ,” where Lwaxana speaks to the Enterprise D’s computer and Barrett Roddenberry performs with herself as her character tries to locate Riker in the former episode and start the holodeck in the latter episode. When Lwaxana commands the computer to “run it for us, dear,” there is a wink and a nod to those watching who get the inside joke.

In addition to her voice work as the computer, Barrett Roddenberry also played many roles on TAS . She voiced regular characters Christine Chapel and M’Ress, as well as Amanda Grayson in “ Yesteryear ” and the cosmic cloud from “ One of Our Planets is Missing .”

TOS star James Doohan was a master of dialects, having performed in thousands of radio shows before and after beginning his TV and film career. Doohan brought those talents to screen both in the accent he added to the Scotty character, but also to the legion of roles he voiced for TOS and TAS . He was the powerful Sargon in “ Return to Tomorrow ,” the M-5 computer in “ The Ultimate Computer ,” the Oracle of the People from “ For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky ,” and the Melkotian warning buoy from “ Spectre of the Gun .” Further, Doohan performed a dizzying array of TAS characters, and his talents are showcased by the fact that he – like Barrett Roddenberry – would sometimes play more than one character in the same episode. Jimmy was both Kaz and Kor in “ The Time Trap ” and Koloth and Korax in “ More Troubles, More Tribbles .” He played the Guardian of Forever in the animated sequel “ Yesteryear ” and Robert April, the first Enterprise captain, in “ The Counter-Clock Incident .”

Fun mentions must include Gene Roddenberry voicing the role of the Galley Chef in “Charlie X” and Leonard Nimoy (using the pseudo name “Frank Force”) performing the U.S.S. Excelsior computer voice in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock . Producer and writer Harve Bennett voices the flight recorder visual computer in the same film.

Also appearing in front of the camera for some roles and as a voice only in other episodes is Barbara Babcock. She played Mea 3 in “A Taste of Armageddon” and Philana in “ Plato’s Stepchildren ” on screen, but also contributed many TOS voiceovers. She was the Tholian Loskene, the Beta 5 computer and the shape-shifting cat Isis in “ Assignment Earth ,” the Zetarians of “ The Lights of Zetar ” and she played Trelane’s Mother in “ The Squire of Gothos .”

Joining Babcock for “ The Squire of Gothos ” as Trelane’s Father was James Bartell “Bart” La Rue, a talented voice artist who played the original Guardian of Forever in “ The City on the Edge of Forever .” La Rue would appear on screen in announcer roles, both as an Ekosian TV journalist in “ Patterns of Force ” and a TV commentator in “ Bread and Circuses .” La Rue also voiced Provider 1 (“ The Gamesters of Triskelion ”) and Yarnek (“ The Savage Curtain ”).

Voice work continued to be an important aspect of Trek , especially as computer effects and modern technologies allowed for the creation of even more spectacular aliens and creatures. For example, the teeny Teenaxi Leader of Star Trek Beyond (given the name “Steve” and title “Grand Audarch of the Teenaxi People” in the comic Star Trek Boldly Go #10) was computer-generated, but his impressive vocalizations – which added to the initial misdirection that the Teenaxians were actually immense aliens – were provided by actor Shea Whigham. Fans of the movie series Fast & Furious may recognize Whigham as Agent Michael Stasiak, but Trek fans know him as the aggressive and questioning leader of the Teenaxi.

Impressive sounding voices added by talented voice artists are able to add a realism to characters even if they are not quite computer-generated perfect in their physicality. Case in point, the TNG character Armus would have been a costume with Metamucil and black printer’s ink poured all over it if not for the performances by the actors who brought the socio-pathetic embodiment of negativity to life. Inside the imaginative costume was actor Mart McChesney (who also played the similarly silhouetted Sheliak in “ The Ensigns of Command ”) and supplying the imposing, malevolent voice that had a hint of vulnerability to it was Ronald Gans. Fans of Lost in Space may know Gans as the Alien Leader in “Deadliest of the Species,” which was one of his on-camera acting roles.

Sometimes, however, there are no special effects. No costumes. No creatures. Sometimes it is only the voice. The superlative example of this kind of voice work is that supplied by Debra Wilson, who played the voice of Captain Lisa Cusak in DS9 ’s “ The Sound of Her Voice .” Using only her voice, Wilson delivered one of Trek ’s most-memorable guest-starring “appearances.” Best known for her many years on MADtv , Wilson actually played Uhura in several of the show’s comedy sketches and was a Trek fan. Bringing with her that Trek affection in combination with her comedic timing and voice artistry, Wilson paints a full picture of a character the other characters – and audience – only get to know from Wilson’s off-screen performance. DS9 was not Wilson's first Trek adventure, as she played a role in the "Klingon Encounter" interactive ride/movie program at Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas a few months before.

As Miles O’Brien says about Lisa, “I never shook her hand and I never saw her face, but she made me laugh and she made me weep.” And that is the power of the voice.

Nicholas Jose S. Tenuto is a high school student and Star Trek fan. His poetry has been published in the Young American Poetry Digest. He is an award-winning photographer, and his “Tipple Ladders” image was an Illinois Parent-Teachers Association Reflections Art Competition State Qualifier. Tenuto is a recipient of the United States Presidential Award for Academic Excellence and a junior member of the Sons of the American Revolution. He's been attending Trek conventions since he was two weeks old, where he was held and given his bottle by actress BarBara Luna. His favorite character is the Doctor from Voyager . Tenuto is currently writing his first book, Lound, an original work of fiction.

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Star trek computer sound.wav.

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This sounds are created by me with synthesizer. Very similar to Star Trek computer sounds.

If you need music or sounddesign check : www.robertoignis.com

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Engineers recreate Star Trek's Holodeck using ChatGPT and video game assets

by Ian Scheffler, University of Pennsylvania

In "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the Holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, of preparing for missions and entertaining them, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes.

Deeply immersive and fully interactive, Holodeck-created environments are infinitely customizable, using nothing but language; the crew has only to ask the computer to generate an environment, and that space appears in the Holodeck.

Today, virtual interactive environments are also used to train robots prior to real-world deployment in a process called "Sim2Real." However, virtual interactive environments have been in surprisingly short supply.

"Artists manually create these environments," says Yue Yang, a doctoral student in the labs of Mark Yatskar and Chris Callison-Burch, Assistant and Associate Professors in Computer and Information Science (CIS), respectively. "Those artists could spend a week building a single environment," Yang adds, noting all the decisions involved, from the layout of the space to the placement of objects to the colors employed in rendering.

That paucity of virtual environments is a problem if you want to train robots to navigate the real world with all its complexities. Neural networks, the systems powering today's AI revolution, require massive amounts of data, which in this case means simulations of the physical world.

"Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are trained on trillions of words, and image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E are trained on billions of images," says Callison-Burch. "We only have a fraction of that amount of 3D environments for training so-called 'embodied AI.' If we want to use generative AI techniques to develop robots that can safely navigate in real-world environments, then we will need to create millions or billions of simulated environments."

Enter Holodeck , a system for generating interactive 3D environments co-created by Callison-Burch, Yatskar, Yang and Lingjie Liu, Aravind K. Joshi Assistant Professor in CIS, along with collaborators at Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). Named for its Star Trek forebear, Holodeck generates a virtually limitless range of indoor environments, using AI to interpret users' requests.

The paper is published on the arXiv preprint server.

"We can use language to control it," says Yang. "You can easily describe whatever environments you want and train the embodied AI agents."

Holodeck leverages the knowledge embedded in large language models (LLMs), the systems underlying ChatGPT, and other chatbots. "Language is a very concise representation of the entire world," says Yang. Indeed, LLMs turn out to have a surprisingly high degree of knowledge about the design of spaces, thanks to the vast amounts of text they ingest during training. In essence, Holodeck works by engaging an LLM in conversation, using a carefully structured series of hidden queries to break down user requests into specific parameters.

Just like Captain Picard might ask Star Trek's Holodeck to simulate a speakeasy, researchers can ask Penn's Holodeck to create "a 1b1b apartment of a researcher who has a cat." The system executes this query by dividing it into multiple steps: First, the floor and walls are created, then the doorway and windows.

Next, Holodeck searches Objaverse , a vast library of premade digital objects, for the sort of furnishings you might expect in such a space: a coffee table, a cat tower, and so on. Finally, Holodeck queries a layout module, which the researchers designed to constrain the placement of objects so that you don't wind up with a toilet extending horizontally from the wall.

To evaluate Holodeck's abilities, in terms of their realism and accuracy, the researchers generated 120 scenes using both Holodeck and ProcTHOR, an earlier tool created by AI2, and asked several hundred Penn Engineering students to indicate their preferred version, not knowing which scenes were created by which tools. For every criterion—asset selection, layout coherence, and overall preference—the students consistently rated the environments generated by Holodeck more favorably.

The researchers also tested Holodeck's ability to generate scenes that are less typical in robotics research and more difficult to manually create than apartment interiors, like stores, public spaces, and offices. Comparing Holodeck's outputs to those of ProcTHOR, which were generated using human-created rules rather than AI-generated text, the researchers found once again that human evaluators preferred the scenes created by Holodeck. That preference held across a wide range of indoor environments, from science labs to art studios, locker rooms to wine cellars.

Finally, the researchers used scenes generated by Holodeck to "fine-tune" an embodied AI agent. "The ultimate test of Holodeck," says Yatskar, "is using it to help robots interact with their environment more safely by preparing them to inhabit places they've never been before."

Across multiple types of virtual spaces, including offices, daycares, gyms and arcades, Holodeck had a pronounced and positive effect on the agent's ability to navigate new spaces.

For instance, whereas the agent successfully found a piano in a music room only about 6% of the time when pre-trained using ProcTHOR (which involved the agent taking about 400 million virtual steps), the agent succeeded over 30% of the time when fine-tuned using 100 music rooms generated by Holodeck.

"This field has been stuck doing research in residential spaces for a long time," says Yang. "But there are so many diverse environments out there—efficiently generating a lot of environments to train robots has always been a big challenge, but Holodeck provides this functionality."

In June, the researchers will present Holodeck at the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Computer Vision Foundation (CVF) Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Conference in Seattle, Washington.

GitHub: yueyang1996.github.io/holodeck/

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Star Trek's Holodeck recreated using ChatGPT and video game assets

In Star Trek: The Next Generation , Captain Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise leverage the holodeck, an empty room capable of generating 3D environments, to prepare for missions and to entertain themselves, simulating everything from lush jungles to the London of Sherlock Holmes. Deeply immersive and fully interactive, holodeck-created environments are infinitely customizable, using nothing but language: the crew has only to ask the computer to generate an environment, and that space appears in the holodeck.

Today, virtual interactive environments are also used to train robots prior to real-world deployment in a process called "Sim2Real." However, virtual interactive environments have been in surprisingly short supply. "Artists manually create these environments," says Yue Yang, a doctoral student in the labs of Mark Yatskar and Chris Callison-Burch, Assistant and Associate Professors in Computer and Information Science (CIS), respectively. "Those artists could spend a week building a single environment," Yang adds, noting all the decisions involved, from the layout of the space to the placement of objects to the colors employed in rendering.

That paucity of virtual environments is a problem if you want to train robots to navigate the real world with all its complexities. Neural networks, the systems powering today's AI revolution, require massive amounts of data, which in this case means simulations of the physical world. "Generative AI systems like ChatGPT are trained on trillions of words, and image generators like Midjourney and DALLE are trained on billions of images," says Callison-Burch. "We only have a fraction of that amount of 3D environments for training so-called 'embodied AI.' If we want to use generative AI techniques to develop robots that can safely navigate in real-world environments, then we will need to create millions or billions of simulated environments."

Enter Holodeck, a system for generating interactive 3D environments co-created by Callison-Burch, Yatskar, Yang and Lingjie Liu, Aravind K. Joshi Assistant Professor in CIS, along with collaborators at Stanford, the University of Washington, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). Named for its Star Trek forebear, Holodeck generates a virtually limitless range of indoor environments, using AI to interpret users' requests. "We can use language to control it," says Yang. "You can easily describe whatever environments you want and train the embodied AI agents."

Holodeck leverages the knowledge embedded in large language models (LLMs), the systems underlying ChatGPT and other chatbots. "Language is a very concise representation of the entire world," says Yang. Indeed, LLMs turn out to have a surprisingly high degree of knowledge about the design of spaces, thanks to the vast amounts of text they ingest during training. In essence, Holodeck works by engaging an LLM in conversation, using a carefully structured series of hidden queries to break down user requests into specific parameters.

Just like Captain Picard might ask Star Trek's Holodeck to simulate a speakeasy, researchers can ask Penn's Holodeck to create "a 1b1b apartment of a researcher who has a cat." The system executes this query by dividing it into multiple steps: first, the floor and walls are created, then the doorway and windows. Next, Holodeck searches Objaverse, a vast library of premade digital objects, for the sort of furnishings you might expect in such a space: a coffee table, a cat tower, and so on. Finally, Holodeck queries a layout module, which the researchers designed to constrain the placement of objects, so that you don't wind up with a toilet extending horizontally from the wall.

To evaluate Holodeck's abilities, in terms of their realism and accuracy, the researchers generated 120 scenes using both Holodeck and ProcTHOR, an earlier tool created by AI2, and asked several hundred Penn Engineering students to indicate their preferred version, not knowing which scenes were created by which tools. For every criterion -- asset selection, layout coherence and overall preference -- the students consistently rated the environments generated by Holodeck more favorably.

The researchers also tested Holodeck's ability to generate scenes that are less typical in robotics research and more difficult to manually create than apartment interiors, like stores, public spaces and offices. Comparing Holodeck's outputs to those of ProcTHOR, which were generated using human-created rules rather than AI-generated text, the researchers found once again that human evaluators preferred the scenes created by Holodeck. That preference held across a wide range of indoor environments, from science labs to art studios, locker rooms to wine cellars.

Finally, the researchers used scenes generated by Holodeck to "fine-tune" an embodied AI agent. "The ultimate test of Holodeck," says Yatskar, "is using it to help robots interact with their environment more safely by preparing them to inhabit places they've never been before."

Across multiple types of virtual spaces, including offices, daycares, gyms and arcades, Holodeck had a pronounced and positive effect on the agent's ability to navigate new spaces.

For instance, whereas the agent successfully found a piano in a music room only about 6% of the time when pre-trained using ProcTHOR (which involved the agent taking about 400 million virtual steps), the agent succeeded over 30% of the time when fine-tuned using 100 music rooms generated by Holodeck.

"This field has been stuck doing research in residential spaces for a long time," says Yang. "But there are so many diverse environments out there -- efficiently generating a lot of environments to train robots has always been a big challenge, but Holodeck provides this functionality."

• Engineering
• Virtual Environment
• Robotics Research
• Civil Engineering
• Artificial Intelligence
• Virtual Reality
• Computer Modeling
• Materials science
• Computer and video game genres
• Search engine
• Mathematical model
• Denaturation (biochemistry)
• Cryptography

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science . Original written by Ian Scheffler. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Yue Yang, Fan-Yun Sun, Luca Weihs, Eli VanderBilt, Alvaro Herrasti, Winson Han, Jiajun Wu, Nick Haber, Ranjay Krishna, Lingjie Liu, Chris Callison-Burch, Mark Yatskar, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Christopher Clark. Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments . Submitted to arXiv , 2024 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2312.09067

Cite This Page :

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