Over the last few weeks, world models have started to feel real for the first time. You can see coherent environments, long rollouts, and increasingly convincing visuals. At the same time, most of these systems are hard to run, hard to integrate, and trade interactivity for scale.

We started Overworld because we cared less about producing impressive videos and more about building worlds you can actually inhabit. That means low latency, continuous control, and systems that respond every time you act, not once per prompt.

Last week, we released Waypoint 1, a research preview of a real-time diffusion world model that runs locally. Next week, we’re releasing Waypoint 1.1 Small, which is designed to run on modern consumer GPUs and be easy to build on and modify.

Waypoint is built from scratch rather than fine-tuned from a large video model. We optimized heavily for control frequency, sparse attention, and fast inference so the system can maintain a persistent world state and respond to input at game-level frame rates. The goal was to make something developers can integrate today, not just watch as a demo.

We think this space will move fastest once world models follow a path similar to LLMs: local execution, open tooling, and fast community-driven iteration. Genie and similar systems show what’s possible at a massive scale. Our focus has been on making that future local and accessible.

We wrote more about the “immersion gap,” why interactivity matters more than visuals alone, and how we optimized the model in a recent blog post.

Code, demos, and release details are here: https://over.world/blog/the-immersion-gap