NVIDIA delivered a speech on Tuesday at the SIGGRAPH 2022, revealing a fresh lineup of metaverse solutions to audiences, including virtual world-building, digital twin, and avatar platforms.
In his speech, Jensen Huang, Founder and Chief Executive of NVIDIA, said in a statement the combination of artificial intelligence and computer graphics would “power the metaverse, the next evolution of the internet.”
I recommend watching @nvidia‘s #SIGGRAPH talk featuring some open Metaverse announcements.
USD is an open source scene graph format Nvidia is helping develop & integrating with glTF.
Covers neural graphics advancements, digital twins, & virtual humans:https://t.co/BX2X0OH19j
— Kent Bye VoicesOfVR (@kentbye) August 9, 2022
He said users could join virtual worlds and digitally-twinned assets for leisure and enterprise use, adding his speech would “further advance the metaverse”.
In Jensen’s speech, he announced several key technologies:
- NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), available next year, for creating and developing avatars, complete with conversational AI and tools such as Audio2Face and Audio2Emotion.
- Universal Scene Description (USD), an open-source programming language from Pixar for developing the Metaverse, creating standards for interoperability
- NVIDIA Omniverse extensions for building interoperable virtual spaces and digital twins
- Novel machine learning-backed tools to streamline graphic workflows
A Closer Look at NVIDIA Omniverse ACE
He added that avatars would remain instrumental in interfacing with users in factories, gaming platforms, and eCommerce spaces, using natural language processing, computer vision, and realistic facial and body animations, all with low-latency performance “to the millisecond.”
Simon Yuen, Senior Director of Graphics and AI for NVIDIA, added,
“With Omniverse ACE, developers can build, configure and deploy their avatar application across any engine in any public or private cloud. We want to democratize building interactive avatars for every platform”
The company’s Audio2Face will also build hyperrealistic avatars from just one photo, apply textures, and create 3D meshes with AI. The tool would also simulate muscle movements and lifelike hair textures.
Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of Omniverse and Simulation Technology at NVIDIA, said his company’s next milestone was to “make USD performant for real-time, large-scale virtual worlds and industrial digital twins” for global character sets, geospatial coordinates, and internet of things (IoT) data streaming.
NVIDIA also plans to open a testing and certification suite for the programming language, along with a library of assets for industrial digital twins and AI-backed training workflows.
The Santa Clara-based enterprise also announced updates to its Omniverse platform, complete with numerous key upgrades for core technologies.
Omniverse Connectors will also integrate with popular content creation platforms such as Unity, Autodesk Alias, SimScale, Blender, the Open Geospatial Consortium, Epic Games, and numerous others, as a beta version, and is currently working with Siemens Xcelerator for building industrial digital twins.
Numerous companies such as Adobe, Dell, Epic Games, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services trialled the Omniverse at the event.
SIGGRAPH 2022 took place 8 – 11 August and wrapped up its world-class event on Thursday in Vancouver, Canada. Over 90 exhibitors across 16 countries.
Over 11,700 people joined the conference to trial new technologies, attend panel talks, and access industry programmes, virtually and in person. Companies such as Vicon, AMD, NVIDIA, Epic Games, CAPCOM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and many others attended the globally-celebrated event.
