MSquared launches Mash to build the Wikipedia for 3D gaming worlds

Dialling in from Web Summit in Lisbon, Rob Whitehead takes a screenshot of his own face on our Teams call and feeds it into Mash, MSquared’s new collaborative AI generation platform. A few seconds later, his face does appear in front of me in 3D form, although, somewhat alarmingly, the body it’s attached to is naked. 

Whitehead races to cover up his virtual self with another screen while updating his search to explicitly include clothing. 

“I have done this demo 100 times and this has never happened before,” he laughs. The figure of Whitehead quickly regenerates to a clothed version and begins to move around the virtual space, dancing and moving, none the wiser to his previously unclothed state. The beauty of live demonstrations. 

Whitehead is showing me the beta version of Mash, which launched this week. It’s a virtual library of 3D generated images bringing gaming, pinterest and open source creation all under one digital roof.

Mash is a product of MSquared, a subcompany of Improbable, a tech unicorn Whitehead co-founded alongside Herman Narula in 2012. Now, Whitehead is CEO of MSquared, the name nodding to the idea of a meta metaverse.

“The marketing team would never allow me to describe it as that, but I find it quite useful and really kind of quite fun personally. That’s what became MSquared,” he says. “It’s basically the metaverse squared.”

Improbable raised $150m back in 2020 from a16z and Softbank to launch the offshoot company, which Whitehead has led since the beginning of this year.

“There’s just been these breakthroughs over the last 18 months in terms of generative AI where it’s unlocked a completely different model for how creativity is going to happen,” he says. 

Whitehead sees 3D creation as the next step on the road of digital, generated content. First we had text, then images, now video and moving into immersive, interactive 3D he sees as the big thing for 2026.

“I’d say we’re not at Will Smith eating spaghetti, nor are we at SORA 2,” he says referring to the viral generated videos of the actor that became a benchmark for how realistic AI generated content is. “We’re kind of halfway in between in terms of the journey. But we’re really on the cusp of that being something really powerful.”

Second Life’s second life?

And we’re really a long way from where Whitehead started out, growing up in Liverpool in the 90s playing Second Life.

“[It] wasn’t a great place for computer science mentorship, let’s put it that way,” he says. “And, you know, serendipitously finding these people in a virtual space who taught me how to do all this stuff — the reason I got into [the University of] Cambridge and who I am today is because of these random humans on the internet in a virtual world who taught me how to be an entrepreneur, taught me how to be a computer scientist.”

Second Life is a multiplayer virtual world that launched in 2003 as a forerunner to what is now known as the metaverse. In a full circle moment, one of Second Life’s founders, former CEO Philip Rosedale, is now an advisor for Improbable.

But the site was “deeply limited by the technology of the time,” Whitehead says.

While the worlds created were beautiful, there was little substance behind it. “It always felt like smoke and mirrors, like people were faking it,” he says. 

So when he and Narula met at university, the limitations of games and of virtual worlds more broadly were front of mind. They set out with the goal of building a simulation engine to allow people to build virtual worlds that felt a lot more alive. They wanted to replicate that unique, typically in-person feeling of community and togetherness you might get at a concert or a stadium, surrounded by people all experiencing the same thing together.

While there were a lot of different applications of their technology — video games, city simulations, simulating internet economies — ironically, it was during lockdown when everyone was at home and online that they were suddenly able to get tens of thousands of people in the same virtual space and replicate that real world feeling online.

“There’s a sense of deep humanity being in a massive crowd of people,” Whitehead says. “It hits different than most other things. And we were able to recreate that sensation within a virtual space. And as a lifelong gamer, I’ve never really felt that before.”

Wikipedia for the virtual world

Mash exists as a collaborative 3D generation project, like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap, but for the gaming world. 

First launched in early testing to users of the Somnia blockchain network — a sister company of Improbable — the goal now is to have thousands of people come together to crowdsource the creation of a collective creative commons. They’re building, in theory, an infinite database of 3D objects to be shared with everyone else in the ecosystem.

“We thought, why not try and make the world’s largest database of 3D assets where anyone on the planet can take a photo of anything, turn it into a virtual world 3D object, and then start to combine those things into bigger and bigger worlds and scenes and games and set up in a way where every single person who’s contributing to that has a role to play and has essentially a potential reward from it,” Whitehead says.

Users can create these 3D items purely for their own use if they want to, creating their own mini virtual worlds. Used in one way, it is the ultimate “cosy building” game, with physics, behaviour and logic added on top. 

It is ideal for anyone who enjoys playing Animal Crossing but wants more personalisation, or for anyone who spent all of their time playing The Sims solely focusing on the house building part and never getting to the actual game play. You could take pictures of everything in your own home and recreate it in miniature, 3D scale or go to IKEA and build replica rooms.

But the goal really is to create community and for it to be an open source, group endeavour.

MSquared has come up with ways to incentivise users to create high quality designs. They’ve begun running 3D classification minigames — given it’s just after Halloween there’s currently an abundance of pumpkins and spooky trees.

Each item also gets an Elo score, like in chess, and they are essentially competing against each other in rankings. This also gives users an opportunity to report anything inappropriate — like an accidental naked guy — when they’re voting on their favourite designs.

“It is an open database but if things are clearly illegal on infringing guidelines then there are mechanisms to delist and remove,” Whitehead says.

There is also a financial incentive, because not only can individual users use other people’s designs, but so can actual gaming companies. This, in effect, gives these companies the opportunity to crowdsource designs from their actual communities.

The platform issues micro royalties every time a piece is used — for example if a rock becomes one of thousands to be used in the next Grand Theft Auto game — which is automatically stored in a wallet.

The object becomes like a minted NFT that companies can use in their own games, and it’s all tracked on blockchain so users can see where their objects have been used and the reward they get from that.

In the future there’s potential for games to then collaborate with MSquared to run their own mini games and encourage users to create items they need, bringing the gaming community directly into the games.

Building a shared repository 

There’s also an environmental upside to this. There is a financial and environmental cost every time something is generated using AI. Rather than having to create these environments from scratch every time, down to the individual tree or stone, games could reuse existing designs.Think of it as the virtual version of the Warner Bros. Studios sets being used for ‘Gilmore Girls’ and ‘Pretty Little Liars’.

“In a world where AI is also quite environmentally wasteful as well, in a video game there are so many assets generated time and time again,” Whitehead says. 

While the hero character would be very important to generate from scratch, there will also be tens of thousands of rocks, trees, shrubs and foliage. “Is it good that they’re generated every single time by every single person? It’s probably better if we were to have a shared repository where statistically I’d say 80% of the time the thing you’re looking for has already been made before.” 

These assets could then be used for anything —  Roblox, Fornite, or any other big game, but it could also be used by individuals to vibe code their own personalised mini games that they share with their friends.

“We believe there is going to be something akin to a TikTok of games,” Whitehead says. “There’s going to be some sort of micro-interactive, experiential thing that anyone on the planet will make and do and share.”

In the same way you share a meme or a TikTok, maybe you’ll make a micro game for your friends and share that instead.

“In this world of transitioning from a billion gamers to a billion game developers, we started thinking about, ‘what would creation look like?’”

Whitehead stresses that it’s about using AI as a tool for creativity amplification rather than just handing the reins over and removing that agency from the individual. The platform is still in its early stages, but Whitehead’s ambitions extend far beyond its current capabilities.

The next phase will give people the ability to upload videos and create moving 3D characters and give them more control to tweak and change their own designs, but continue to encourage users to collaborate and remix each other’s work to build increasingly complex creations from simple components. 

As part of that, everything users create is public and anyone can click on another individual’s profile and see the full list of everything they’ve generated. It’s similar to Pinterest but there is no option to make anything private.

According to Whitehead, there was a big internal discussion about whether to let people create things privately, but the team ultimately decided against it, at least for now — there are other paid programs for that. 

“This is about planting a bit of a flag and saying this is actually like a human creativity project,” he says. “It’s about having a group of people coming together to build something bigger than they could themselves individually.”

In a gaming world increasingly dominated by purely AI-generated content, that human element might be exactly what's needed.