KRAFTON takes AI research into socially intelligent robotics. KRAFTON subsidiary Ludo Robotics advances socially intelligent robotics with Ludi 0.2, combining AI reasoning, gesture recognition and physical movement. 02 Nov 2026 15:47 IST 0.75x 1x 1.5x 00:00 / 00:00 KRAFTON Inc. is expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) research into robotics through Ludo Robotics, a subsidiary developing systems that enable robots to understand, communicate and collaborate with people. The company's approach builds on its experience developing AI for interactive gaming environments. KRAFTON has invested in machine learning, reinforcement learning, large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI to create systems that can interpret player behaviour and respond in real time. Its research includes proprietary AI foundation models and Co-Playable Characters (CPCs), developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. These systems aim to understand players and respond dynamically to their actions within virtual environments. Ludo Robotics aims to extend similar capabilities into physical environments. The company recently presented Ludi 0.2, the latest version of its robotic intelligence system, at the 2026 Bay Area Robotics Symposium (BARS) at the University of California, Berkeley. "For nearly two decades, KRAFTON has built games and virtual worlds where people and intelligent systems interact in real time," said CH Kim, CEO of KRAFTON and Ludo Robotics. "Through Ludo Robotics, we're building on that experience to explore how AI can better understand people and interact with them naturally in the physical world." Ludi 0.2 advances human-robot interaction. Ludo Robotics is developing general-purpose robotic intelligence systems that can interpret human intent, adapt to changing environments and collaborate with people. The research addresses a fundamental challenge in robotics: enabling machines to understand context and human behaviour instead of relying exclusively on predefined commands. The company introduced Ludi 0.1 in August 2026. The system combined a vision-language model for reasoning and dialogue with specialised navigation and manipulation capabilities. It could interpret spoken instructions, maintain conversational context, ask clarifying questions and adapt to changing tasks within supported environments. Ludi 0.2 builds on these capabilities across five areas: * Social intelligence: Improving the system's ability to interpret human intent, respond to feedback and recognise social cues. * Memory and reasoning: Maintaining conversational context and reasoning through changing tasks and situations. * Tool coordination: Coordinating capabilities for navigation, physical manipulation and human interaction. * Gesture interpretation: Recognising and responding to human gestures during physical interactions. * Physical movement: Supporting smoother and more adaptable movement in supported environments. Together, these capabilities bring communication, reasoning and physical action closer within a unified robotic intelligence system. "Robots are becoming increasingly capable of performing physical tasks, but understanding and responding to people remains a major challenge," said Kangwook Lee, Chief AI Officer of KRAFTON and CTO of Ludo Robotics. "Ludi 0.2 represents another step towards our goal of bringing conversation, reasoning and physical action together so robots can better understand human intent, respond to feedback and adapt as situations change." Ludo Robotics is also developing Ludi 1.0, a next-generation foundation model. The company aims to integrate perception, dialogue and physical action within a unified system. This approach could help robots maintain a shared understanding of tasks with people while communicating and acting in real time. Research across AI and robotics. Ludo Robotics operates from its headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and a research and development laboratory in Seoul, South Korea. The locations give its research teams access to academic institutions, AI researchers and the wider technology ecosystem. The company's scientific leadership combines expertise in machine learning, robotics and human-computer interaction. Kangwook Lee, CTO of Ludo Robotics and Chief AI Officer of KRAFTON, previously served as a tenured associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research covers machine learning, LLMs, reinforcement learning and multimodal AI. Chief Scientist Rob Nowak, an IEEE Fellow and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specialises in machine learning, embodied AI and robot learning. Yea-Seul Kim, who leads human-robot interaction research, previously served as an assistant professor of computer sciences at the same university. Her work focuses on human-computer interaction, information visualisation and data science. Beyond model development, Ludo Robotics is examining how robots can handle the complexity of real-world human interactions. These interactions often involve ambiguous instructions, changing preferences, non-verbal communication and unpredictable behaviour. To address these challenges, the company combines simulated environments, AI-generated social interactions and real-world human behaviour data. It is also developing evaluation benchmarks to assess how robots respond to different personalities, preferences and relationships, as well as how they perform physical manipulation tasks guided by human gestures. The company's longer-term research aims to bring socially intelligent robots into homes, workplaces and other real-world environments, where they can collaborate more naturally with people.

A PUBG TV show is coming to Netflix, starring Donald Glover. November 2, 2026 Krafton and Netflix today announced a live-action TV show based on PUBG, and it will star Emmy-winner Donald Glover. In fact, Glover will not only star, but also direct, write, and executive produce the show, along with his brother, Stephen Glover, as writer and executive producer. That's all Krafton had to say in its announcement, so it sounds like early days for the PUBG series. A PUBG animated series is on the way, too, from Castlevania's Adi Shankar. Krafton has maintained that it sees PUBG not just as a game, but a connected universe, so it's only fitting that the company would get into TV. PUBG is a battle royale game where players duke it out to be the last person or team standing. The game remains immensely popular, boasting more than 785,000 peak concurrent users on Steam alone today. November 2, 2026 Gaming November 2, 2026 Gaming November 1, 2026

KRAFTON launches k-pop AI chat service Kiff in south korea. Nov 1, 2026 KRAFTON, Inc. launched the domestic service of its K-pop AI character chat service Kiff at 2:00 PM on the 2nd. The service is available for users aged 14 and older and is provided in Korean on iOS and Android apps. Developed and operated by KRAFTON, Kiff is a service where users can chat about K-pop with characters envisioned directly by the artists themselves. Girl group FIFTY FIFTY from ATTRAKT joined as the first featured artists. The members directly participated in conceptualizing the persona and visual design of the official character 'Wenny'. The conversation format is divided into a text-based chat mode and a character mode that reacts to the character on screen. In character mode, the character moves in response to dialogue, such as waving a hand when greeted by the user. The character remembers past conversations and user preferences, reflecting them in subsequent chats. It can initiate conversations or share news about the artists to keep the dialogue going, and also features a function to turn the day's conversations into a picture diary. The process of the FIFTY FIFTY members visiting KRAFTON to create 'Wenny' is being released on Kiff's official YouTube channel. Following Episode 1 released on the 24th, Episode 2 will be showcased on the 2nd. Jaemin Park, Head of KRAFTON's AI Frontier Div., said, "KRAFTON has long researched AI that enables in-game characters to communicate naturally with users." He added, "Based on that experience, we created a new way for fans to enjoy the artist's universe up close. Starting with Kiff, we will expand our AI business to more artists and broader markets." KRAFTON plans to expand participating artists and service countries in the future, while sequentially adding new features. Detailed information about the service is available on Kiff's official website and YouTube channel. Originally written in Korean, this article was translated with AI assistance and edited by a native English-speaking editor. Every translation is reviewed by its editorial team before publication. [Read Original]