ANNOUNCEMENT: TopTop, Newborn Town's social platform, has launched Slap Showdown, an AI-powered 3D interactive mini-game developed with Viggle, a company focused on physics-native world models. The game launched in September and, according to a statement released on October 26, 2026, has gained traction in Japan, among Spanish-speaking users in North America and across the Middle East, and is now available in multiple countries.
The core idea is to turn a photo uploaded from a phone into a personalized 3D character in around 30 seconds, according to the companies. The statement cites examples such as an anime protagonist, a cyberpunk cyborg or a LEGO minifigure. Players then take the character into multiplayer battles, using press-and-hold, tap and drag controls, to which the character responds with physics-based movement.
The engagement figures are the company's own claims, not independent measurements. According to TopTop's operations team, the game recorded a 97% match completion rate in its first month, with a game-start rate above the platform average. The statement also cites a player in Japan with 1,041 matches in 22 days, peaking at 151 matches in a day, and another in Eastern Europe with 735 matches in 11 days.
The technology behind the game is Viggle's Joint Space-Time (JST) world model. On October 19, Viggle launched JST-2, which the company compares, in importance for world models, to GPT-2's role for language models. According to Viggle, JST-2 learns the structure and dynamics of the 3D world directly, rather than inferring them only from pixels, using units resembling digital atoms that carry position, material, colour, mass and movement information.
Viggle also says JST-2 generates a 3D scene in seconds, at an inference cost of less than one US cent, and that the content can be rendered locally without running the foundation model for every frame. These are company claims made in the statement, not independently verified results in this article.
For context, Viggle was founded in 2022 and became known for Meme Maker, a tool that animates static characters. In August 2024, it raised $19 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Looking ahead, TopTop says future releases could take AI 3D generation beyond avatars, to personalized environments, and Viggle plans JST-3 as a broader world simulator, including for game engines and robotics training. Those are plans, not delivered products.
Fontes: TNGlobal / PRNewswire — Newborn Town e Viggle lançam jogo 3D com IA e Viggle — JST-2.
Image credit: Newborn Town and Viggle, press image via PRNewswire. The image shows promotional material for the TopTop and Viggle partnership.
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, cross-checked against public posts on X and internet sources. Check the original sources to confirm the details.
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