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Alibaba Launches Happy Oyster: New Era in Virtual Worlds

4/17/2026

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Summary

Story summary

On April 16, 2026, Alibaba Group introduced Happy Oyster, an open-ended world model for real-time virtual world creation.
Happy Oyster supports two modes, directing and wandering, with directing building worlds from text and image prompts and wandering enabling exploration.
The launch follows Li Fei-Fei's World Labs unveiling Spark 2.0, with experts predicting world models will become a focus with applications in film and gaming.

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Story summary

On April 16, 2026, Alibaba Group introduced Happy Oyster, an open-ended world model for real-time virtual world creation.
Happy Oyster supports two modes, directing and wandering, with directing building worlds from text and image prompts and wandering enabling exploration.
The launch follows Li Fei-Fei's World Labs unveiling Spark 2.0, with experts predicting world models will become a focus with applications in film and gaming.