It might have been an invention of the 24th century on television, but researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have brought that sci-fi dream to life today!

Calling their new system "Holodeck" in honor of its Star Trek origins, the Penn researchers are using artificial intelligence to analyze simple language and then generate photorealistic 3D virtual environments based on what the user requests. Simply put, just like Captain Picard could ask the holodeck for a detective's office from the 1940s, the Penn team just can ask for, "a 1-bedroom apartment for a researcher who has a cat." In seconds, Holodeck will generate the floors, walls, windows, and furnishings and even inject realistic clutter like a cat tower.

"We can use language to control it," says Yue Yang, a doctoral student who co-created Holodeck, in a university release. "You can easily describe whatever environments you want and train the embodied AI agents."

Training robots in virtual spaces before unleashing them in the real world is known as "Sim2Real." Until now, however, generating those virtual training grounds has been a painfully slow process.