>. Niko Huang
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FOUNDER · RESEARCHER · ENGINEER

Niko Huang

I'm Niko, with a PhD in computer graphics from the University of Tokyo, advised by Prof. Takashi Kanai. My PhD was on fracture animation, using AI to predict how things break. The squirrel behind this text is that work; click it. Now I'm building world simulation for role-play: worlds that keep running by their own rules. We believe tabletop RPGs can become world simulation. From that idea we build AI character agents, and we open-sourced NeonRP, our Dungeon Master harness, which turns any game idea and rulebook into a DM harness of its own. We also make Panu, characters with personalities of their own: a friend from another world, who lives each day in their own world but chats with you like a real friend. I founded Ludic Dynamics; before that I was a game engineer at DeNA and an IoT full-stack engineer at Butlr Japan.

Base Tokyo Focus World simulation · Character agents · Computer Graphics Updated July 2026
GitHub X / Twitter Threads RED HuggingFace
SELECTED WORKS

Agentic games, research systems, and interactive demos — newest first.

01 LIVE · OPEN SOURCE

NeonRP

Open-source world simulation / Custom DM harness / Playable

Today's agents are built for coding tasks. NeonRP turns a game idea and rulebook into a custom DM harness: fast (a turn in under 10 seconds), no coding environment, and an agent game master that validates every event against world state. In the clip: ask a character, roll a perception check, and the world settles the result.

World SimulationDM HarnessOpen Source2026
Play NeonRP → GitHub Benchmark
02 IN TESTING

Panu

Independent persona agents / Serial worlds / In testing

Each character lives their own story in their own world, with their own memory and choices, and can be your friend from a different worldline. An author writes the week on our serial desk, the engine runs the days, and your messages change what characters choose. Rooms let 2-3 friends share a world.

Persona AgentsSerial WorldsRooms2026
About Panu →
Panu — a character's day, their moments, and their persona
03 LIVE · OPEN SOURCE IN PREPARATION

Living Canvas

Infinite canvas / The world laid out / Edit it in place

People, places, relations and what is happening — all on one canvas with no edge. The agent's cursor reads files, writes files, moves people from place to place; every card you see is a real file in the world, so change one and the world is different tomorrow. Her little world and the world she lives in are two faces of the same canvas.

Living CanvasFile-backedLive · 2026
Open Living Canvas → WorldLines
Living Canvas — cards, places and people on one infinite canvas; the agent cursor at work
BLOGS & TALKS

Writing from the lab, plus conference talks and media.

WRITING ARCHIVE
Building a 🦞-style Agents Engine to Run TRPG
From AI chatbots to Claude Code TRPG, then building my own multi-agent engine. A four-month journey.
May 2026
Version Control for Story Worlds
WorldLines makes worlds and souls version-controlled — a commit-tree you can branch, restore, and share.
May 2026
Six Things Only WorldLines Does
Six things you'll feel in WorldLines that you won't find in chat-based AI roleplay.
May 2026
Why We Start in Tokyo
What Ludic Dynamics builds, how it differs from existing AI roleplay, and why Tokyo is our launchpad.
Mar 2026
RESEARCH DECK
From Character Role-Play to Orchestrated Reality
The framework paper behind WorldLines: LLM-driven game world simulation as a parameterized-action POMDP.
CHI PLAY Companion ’26 · ACM
Neural Interpolation-Based Hair Simulation for Diverse Hairstyles
Simulating hair across diverse hairstyles with neural interpolation. With Watanabe and Kanai.
Visual Computing 2026 · Sapporo
Far-From-Boundary Fields for Learning Segmented Implicit Solids
Learning segmented implicit solids with far-from-boundary distance fields.
SMI 2026 · Computers & Graphics
Presented at Eurographics 2026 (EG 2026)
DeepFracture: predicting brittle fractures with neural discrete representation learning.
Conference talk · May 2026
"Why Chinese AI Talent is in Japanese Startups"
A NIKKEI Business Daily feature on the wave of Chinese AI engineers building inside Japan's startup ecosystem.
NIKKEI Business Daily · June 2023

NEWS

2026.10.05
🎨 Living Canvas is live at canvas.worldlines.gg — a whole world laid out on one canvas, places and people as real files, the agent’s cursor at work. Open source in preparation.neonrp / worldlines 0.4.2 on PyPI — the engine and the shell now update separately.
2026.09.10
🚀 Released neonrp / worldlines 0.4.2 on PyPI — the engine and the shell now update separately.
2026.09.03
🎤 Presented "Multi-Agent LLM Simulation for Living Game Worlds" at IPSJ Entertainment Computing 2026, Kyoto — oral + the playable multi-agent world 時間陣.
2026.09
🎤 Co-authored "Neural interpolation-based hair simulation for diverse hairstyles" (Watanabe, Huang, Kanai), Visual Computing 2026, Sapporo."Multi-Agent LLM Simulation for Living Game Worlds" at IPSJ Entertainment Computing 2026, Kyoto — oral + the playable multi-agent world 時間陣.
2026.07.25
📄 "From Character Role-Play to Orchestrated Reality" accepted at CHI PLAY Companion ’26 (ACM).
2026.07.18
💥 Released the DeepFracture live web runtime — real-time in-browser fracture demo (+ 🤗 Space & Colab).
2026.05.31
📄 "Far-From-Boundary Fields for Learning Segmented Implicit Solids" accepted to Computers & Graphics.
2026.05.08
📄 Presented DeepFracture at Eurographics 2026 (EG 2026).
2026.04.27
📢 Selected for the AG1 batch hosted by Asu Capital.
2026.04.25
🚀 Released WorldLines v0.1.*.
2026.03
🎤 Co-authored "Neural interpolation-based hair simulation for diverse hairstyles" (Watanabe, Huang, Kanai) at Expressive Japan 2026.
2026.03.24
🎓 Earned the Ph.D. degree in Computer Graphics from the University of Tokyo.
2025.11
📝 Review article "Data-driven physics-based CG animation" (Kanai, Li, Huang) in the ITE Journal special issue on frontiers of CG.
2025.09
🏆 Received the VC Research Incentive Award (VC2025) for "Distance Field Design with Far-From-Boundary Normalization for Fragment Shape Learning"; also gave an invited talk on DeepFracture at Visual Computing 2025.
2025.08
📄 DeepFracture awarded the GRSI Replicability Stamp; released the Hugging Face Model 🤗 and Dataset 🔗.
2025.02
📄 DeepFracture paper accepted to Computer Graphics Forum (February 2025).
2024.08
🎤 Presented poster "Brittle Fracture Animation with VQ-VAE-Based Generative Method" at SCA 2024 in Montreal, Canada.
2023.06
📰 Featured in NIKKEI Business Daily: "Why Chinese AI Talent is in Japanese Startups".

PUBLICATIONS

"From Character Role-Play to Orchestrated Reality: LLM-Driven Game World Simulation as a Parameterized-Action POMDP" ☆
Yuhang Huang, Chenmiao Li, Chaowei Fang
CHI PLAY Companion ’26 (ACM); preprint arXiv:2606.16014. The framework paper behind WorldLines.
DOI →arXiv →Landing page →Code (WorldLines) →
"Multi-Agent LLM Simulation for Living Game Worlds: Coordinating World, Soul, and Player Agents over a Pub/Sub Message Bus"
Yuhang Huang, Chenmiao Li, Chaowei Fang
IPSJ Entertainment Computing 2026, Kyoto (oral + playable demo 時間陣). The system paper behind WorldLines.
Paper page →
"Far-From-Boundary Fields for Learning Segmented Implicit Solids"
Yuhang Huang, Takashi Kanai
Computers & Graphics, Volume 138, Article 104648, 2026.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cag.2026.104648 →Project page →
"DeepFracture: A Generative Approach for Predicting Brittle Fractures with Neural Discrete Representation Learning"
Yuhang Huang, Takashi Kanai
Computer Graphics Forum, e70002, 15 pages, February 2025.
DOI: 10.1111/cgf.70002 →Project page →Live demo →