>. Niko Huang
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FOUNDER · RESEARCHER · ENGINEER

Niko Huang

I build character agents that live in worlds of their own, and study how worlds can remember. Founder of Ludic Dynamics — we make WorldLines: a character with her own day (she reads, writes, goes out, comes back to find you), Living Canvas to lay her world out and change it, and the world-simulation engine underneath, which is opening up. Ph.D. in Computer Graphics at the University of Tokyo (advised by Prof. Takashi Kanai), where I worked on physics-based animation and multi-phase SDF representations for fracture. Previously a game engineer at DeNA and tech lead at Butlr Japan.

Base Tokyo Focus Agentic AI · Game · Computer Graphics Updated July 2026
GitHub X / Twitter Threads RED HuggingFace
SELECTED WORKS

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

01 ACTIVE · FOUNDER

WorldLines

Character agents / Living worlds / World-simulation engine

Only a character who lives in a world is a real character. WorldLines gives her a world that keeps moving on its own and a day of her own — she reads, writes, goes out on her own adventures, and comes back to find you. Underneath: a world-simulation engine (opening up) where every change is proposed, validated, then committed — so the world remembers correctly, whichever model is talking.

Character AgentsWorld SimulationOpen-sourcing2026
Visit site → GitHub
02 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
Presented at Eurographics 2026 (EG 2026)
Research on segmented implicit solids and far-from-boundary distance fields at one of computer graphics' flagship venues.
Conference talk · May 2026
Brittle Fracture Animation with VQ-VAE
A VQ-VAE-based generative method for brittle fracture animation, presented as a poster.
SCA 2024 Poster · Montreal
"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
ABOUT

My work sits between games, AI agents, and computer graphics research. Some of it is published research on physics-based animation; some is shipping, playable systems where autonomous agents drive narrative and play. WorldLines is where those two threads meet — an attempt to build worlds that remember.

If we are standing at the early stage of agent-native games, I want to see that landscape clearly — and build the tools that let more people make worlds of their own.

EDUCATION
Ph.D. in Computer Graphics, University of Tokyo (advised by Prof. Takashi Kanai), 2026
PREVIOUSLY
Game Engineer at DeNA · IoT Full-Stack at Butlr
NOW
Founder of WorldLines / Ludic Dynamics

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 a work 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 →