Activision’s big contribution to AI is Call of Duty: Warzone data

Activision is sharing an open-source dataset for Call of Duty: Warzone’s Caldera map for researchers to study and to help support AI model training. “This first-of-its-kind data set release for Call of Duty, now available in OpenUSD, contains the near-complete geometry of Caldera as well as a collection of randomly selected anonymized time samples showing how players move around the map,” Activision writes in a blog post.

It’s a huge dataset. According to Michael Vance, an Activision SVP and fellow software engineer, it’s not only one of “the largest production-validated open data set releases from the gaming industry in terms of complexity of geometry and instance counts” but also one of the largest publicly available OpenUSD data sets, period. (OpenUSD is essentially a file format for 3D content creation.)

Activision also believes this dataset provides “excellent data” for AI training and the evolution of content generation techniques, according to CTO Natalya Tatarchuk. The video game industry, like many other industries, is exploring ways it can take advantage of generative AI, despite concerns from game developers, and this data could be used to assist with those efforts.