NWCapture Usage Instructions

nwcapture_usage_instructions.md

NWCapture World Recording Instructions

What is a neural world?

Please read http://madebyoll.in/posts/world_emulation_via_neural_network.

You can also find more experimental neural worlds at https://neuralworlds.net.

What is the NWCapture App?

It's an iOS app used for recording video + motion data (nwraw bundles) that can be converted into neural worlds.

How do I capture a good nwraw file?

Once you have the NWCapture app installed:

1. Collect the recording
   1. Find an interesting or beautiful moment / place
   2. Before recording, move your phone around to start tracking, then hold it still to make sure tracking is stable before starting to record.
   3. Record a single area densely (walking / looking around for several minutes with a variety of camera motions & viewpoints) rather than just walking in a straight line or standing in one place. Worlds work best when the training data has dense coverage of diverse actions within a limited scene.
   4. Keep your camera around head/neck-level (so the video viewpoint is similar to your eyes' viewpoint). Worlds work best when the training controls behave similarly to the first-person mouse+WASD controls used at inference time.
   5. Record around 5-15 minutes of video (10 minutes is good). More video coverage will generally yield less-glitchy worlds.
2. Press the share arrow to export the nwraw. For conversion, you'll want to send/upload:
   EDIT: there is now support for direct uploading, scroll down
   1. The nwraw bundle. Links to Google Drive, iCloud Drive, etc. should work. Bonus points if you zip/tgz it first (TODO: app should do this eventually)
   2. (Optional) a short description for the neuralworlds.net page.

My yield of somewhat-playable worlds is still quite low even when following these guidelines 🥲 but so far these have had the best odds

2026-03-01 Updated instructions for direct server upload

The NWCapture app now supports creating worlds directly.

Set up server uploads

Tap the lozenge above the record button to bring up settings

Enable server upload and enter your server key:

You should now have a "Create World" button on the main screen.

Create a world

Tap the "Create World" button to bring up the world-creation sheet:

Upload the recordings you want to use, name the world, and set the server processing effort.

Press the bottom "Create World" button to submit the form and get a world page on neuralworlds.net

At that point, the world request is in a queue and will start being processed once the GPU server is free, at which point you should start seeing a progressbar on the world page.

During processing, you can reload the world page to see the latest checkpoint (it updates every few minutes).

Once processing completes, the progressbar will go away and the GPU server will start processing the next world creation request.