By Adam Pease
This last week at its SIGGRAPH 2022 conference for computer graphics, NVIDIA unveiled a number of upcoming innovations in graphics processing and creative tools. In particular, its announcements focused on the metaverse and on tools for building high-quality virtual agents. This blog discusses the conference and the implications of NVIDIA’s investment in the metaverse.
What Did NVIDIA Reveal?
A significant focus of the reveals was an emerging suite of creative tools that help animators and other workers that make use of computer graphics incorporate AI tools directly into their workflow. From the creation of digital twins to the acceleration of rendering pipelines with emerging AI graphics applications like neural fields, the theme was the power of intelligence to transform the speed of prototyping and designing in 3D.
A second major emphasis of the conference was the power of AI to accelerate the creation of avatars and virtual assistants in the metaverse. The newly announced NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine, or ACE for short, functions as a kind of infrastructure for building avatars at scale, which combines a variety of different AI functions from computer vision to speech and natural language understanding to make it easy for organizations to produce digital avatars for use either as virtual assistants or in another metaverse context.
NVIDIA and the Future of Metaverse
Underlying much of the emerging technology at NVIDIA is a pivot towards the metaverse as a future platform for entertainment and collaboration. In particular, it has geared its services to engineers and other professionals that can benefit from state-of-the-art graphics processing. The NVIDIA Omniverse is an immersive digital environment that allows engineers to produce rich and complex simulations and collaborate in real-time.
Aragon has recently covered the emerging generative content market, which equips businesses with the tools to generate media of many different kinds using AI. To make digital environments scalable, unique, and dynamic metaverse providers will need to be able to leverage generative content to create rich digital spaces and experiences. By synthesizing neural networks and computer graphics, NVIDIA is building the tools that will make the metaverse possible at scale.
Bottom Line
NVIDIA’s announcements at SIGGRAPH 2022 portend a continued focus on the metaverse, with many bricks being laid when it comes to fundamental infrastructure that makes digital, immersive collaboration streamlined and feature-rich.