The gaming and interactive media industries are built on the ambition of creating experiences that customers love. Players expect living, reactive worlds. Studios dream big to fulfill those expectations but often find themselves blocked by outdated workflows and legacy pipelines. Instead of creating, teams are stuck firefighting, forced to choose between quality, speed, or simply surviving. In recent years, that pressure has led to burnout, delays, and layoffs.
Stockholm-based startup Motorica is changing that. By combining generative AI with animation, they’ve developed a solution that reduces animation time by up to 99% without compromising creative control. Capabilities once reserved for blockbuster projects are now within reach for any studio.
Research breakthrough forms the mission of empowering artists
In 2019, researchers Gustav Henter and Simon Alexanderson achieved a breakthrough with the world’s first deep generative model for motion synthesis. Their innovation led to the incorporation of Motorica in 2020, supported by an Epic Games Mega Grant, to further advance the science. In 2023, repeat founder Willem Demmers partnered with the researchers to found a startup built on their breakthrough, with the mission of empowering animators by automating chores so they can focus on creative work.
To support this mission, Motorica built a motion capture studio in Stockholm, giving them full control over high-quality locomotion data. Today, the company maintains one of the world’s largest proprietary motion datasets recorded with professional performers, ensuring both biomechanical accuracy and visual style. That dataset powers Motorica’s generative AI and anchors its position in the gaming industry.
Animation at scale without the chores
Until now, game animation was a long, expensive process riddled with production limits. If you’ve ever seen a character moonwalk into a wall or cycle through canned gestures, you know the issue. Players expect more; worlds that react, characters that feel alive, and movement that feels bespoke and authored.
Hit games like The Last of Us and Assassin’s Creed raised that bar with Motion Matching. But achieving emotionally resonant animation takes scale—millions of clean, coherent frames. Motion Matching helped, but only for studios with the time and budget to handcraft data.
That’s where Motorica entered. Their proprietary model and custom data pipeline allow studios to generate vast amounts of animation that is physically accurate and character-consistent. Animations can follow detailed instructions—speed, timing, trajectory, while maintaining character identity. This precise tailoring positions Motorica as the first generative motion tool designed to meet the requirements of AAA studios.
Top-tier studios worldwide have integrated Motorica, reporting production speeds up to 200x faster than traditional capture. But the impact goes beyond speed: teams can now build richer, more reactive worlds without ballooning budgets.
While some debate focuses on AI replacing artists, Motorica emphasizes empowerment. Its tools extend the reach of animators, enabling faster iteration and more focus on performance rather than overhead. It’s not replacement, it’s creative scale without constraint.
Breaking barriers for Living Worlds
The line between digital and physical experience is getting thinner by the day. Animation is no longer just a production step. It’s the foundation of how we live, move, and connect. A new generation of experiences is taking shape. They are immersive, responsive, and alive in ways we once thought were science fiction. These are Living Worlds.
Living Worlds are no longer a concept; they’re the future being built today. Worlds that move with you, characters that respond in real time. For studios ready to scale immersion without limits, this is the path forward. Not pre-rendered. Not hardcoded. Alive.
Studios aren’t just chasing beauty, they’re chasing believability. But hitting that level takes more than vision. It takes clean, coherent, expressive motion at scale. That’s where generative tools come in. They don’t just make animation faster; they unlock freedom. Freedom to iterate. Freedom to scale complexity without scaling cost. Freedom to create without compromise.
For Motorica, this was always the mission – to give studios full control over performance, style, and scale, while staying compatible with the tools they already use. No blackbox. No trade-offs.
While games were the first application, the potential extends further. Film, simulation, healthcare, and robotics all depend on lifelike motion. Motorica’s technology positions it to influence these fields as well, wherever expressive movement at scale is required.
About Motorica
Motorica is a Stockholm-based AI company focused on generative animation for 3D character motion. Founded to address the growing demand for scalable, high-quality animation, Motorica develops technology that combines machine learning, motion capture, and compatible solutions for industry tools such as motion matching.
