With AI powering a range of new world-building apps, 2025 could be the year the metaverse finally makes an impact. Midjourney joins the world-building club with Patchwork, a collaborate canvas for creating “infinite” fictional worlds. Now in research preview, the tool is being developed as a standalone app, though preview access requires a Midjourney Discord account linked to a Google account. Users are able to connect characters and worlds, and “share” their developing world — evolving as a “board” — with up to 100 collaborative partners on Midjourney (though the company recommends fewer participants for a more focused experience).

“The news comes as other AI researchers, startups such as Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs, and big tech companies” including Google DeepMind with Genie 2 “seek to develop AI that can create 3D immersive, navigable worlds online from simple prompts or images,” VentureBeat reports in a detailed tutorial on how to use Patchwork.

The browser-based tool opens as a blank white canvas with a “toolbox” to the left and buttons labeled for things like “character,” “event,” “faction,” “place,” “prop” and “random.”

“‘Save’ downloads a JSON file with links to all the Midjourney images created in the canvas,” VentureBeat explains, noting that “Midjourney considers each canvas a separate digital ‘world.’”

A Patchwork user guide advises that “when you first join, you’ll be in a ‘lobby’ space with ‘sandboxes’ where people have created portals to their own world.” First you click on a portal to travel to the sandbox space, then you can leapfrog to other worlds that people have created.

Midjourney’s Max Kreminski, who heads the startup’s Storytelling Lab, debuted Patchwork on a Discord live stream that was also shared on X.

After trying it out, Tom’s Guide confessed some confusion yet concludes it is potentially useful — “sort of a cross between a designer’s mood board and sketch pad but for AI.”

“Ultimately, it appears to be a novel, complex, powerful, somewhat overwhelming yet compelling tool for storyboarding” that VentureBeat envisions could be “used by writers and film directors, game designers, comic book creators and even live theater directors and writers.”

With upward of 21 million users on the Midjourney Discord server using its AI image creation and editing tools, the company is now branching out from those core competencies to try new things, VentureBeat notes. The company announced in March that it was training a generative video model (yet to be released) as well as “real-time creation models that would allow it to simulate the entire world,” which sounds like Patchwork.