If you want to say that the hottest concept in the past two years, it must be the metaverse.
In the past, Facebook changed its name to Meta, and then a well-known singer spent $780,000 to buy land in the metaverse. However, there is praise, there is controversy, many people think that the metaverse is just a bubble hyped by capital, and the famous science fiction artist Liu Cixin also said: "The 'metaverse' is an involution of human civilization, and it will eventually lead mankind to a dead end." ”
In fact, in my opinion, the metaverse is not important, at least not now, what matters is the technology involved behind the metaverse.
The metaverse given by Roblox contains eight elements: identity, friends, immersion, low latency, diversity, anytime, anywhere, economic system, and civilization. Among them, immersion, low latency, and anytime, anywhere are three factors related to technology, which are closely related to chips. In other words, without the support of chips, the metaverse will always be just a utopian dream about a new social system.
Seeing this, some friends will be curious: What if you put aside the social attributes in the concept of the metaverse and simply build a digital universe?
NVIDIA's Omniverse platform provides the answer – it will be a "metaverse" for creators.
Omniverse is an open, easily scalable platform built for virtual collaboration and physically accurate real-time simulations.
To put it bluntly, NVIDIA Omniverse transforms industry workflows, with a shared collaboration environment that provides manufacturing players with a cloud-like collaboration platform like Slack. Creators, designers, researchers, and engineers can connect major design tools, assets, and projects to collaborate and iterate in a shared virtual space to get work done at a lower cost and with greater efficiency.
We all know that many things in the real world are extremely costly for trial and error.
Taking autonomous driving as an example, if there is a slight mistake in any link in the R&D and testing process, once it is mass-produced and marketed, it may pay the price of dozens or hundreds of lives. However, in the process of R&D and testing of autonomous driving systems, manufacturers have no way to test the car in real road conditions, and it is difficult to build a simulation of complex road conditions in the real world.
Drive Sim, built on the Omniverse platform, solves this problem.
It uses NVIDIA's core technology to build a powerful, high-fidelity** cloud computing that generates datasets for training vehicle perception systems and provides a virtual test environment to test the vehicle's decision-making process and how it behaves in extreme situations. This enables the connection of the autonomous driving software stack in a software-in-the-loop or hardware-in-the-loop configuration to enable complete driving experience testing at the lowest cost.
Of course, there's more to Omniverse than meets the eye.
According to NVIDIA's official website, the Omniverse platform has three main application effects:
1) It can realize real-time integration of users and mainstream industry 3D design tools on a single interactive platform.
2) Provide scalable, realistic real-time ray tracing and path tracing.
3) Achieve model scalability, developers only need to build the model once, and it can be rendered on different devices.
In the past, engineers using different 3D software worked in a single-threaded mode, one person finished it and then gave it to another person, and the people behind encountered problems and traced them up layer by layer, which was a very cumbersome process. The advent of Omniverse allows creators, designers, researchers, and engineers using different 3D software to collaborate and iterate in a virtual space shared by different endpoints, dramatically improving productivity.
To date, more than 500 companies around the world are using NVIDIA's Omniverse for their work, including architecture, entertainment, manufacturing, supercomputing, and game development.
The well-known BMW Group has created a digital twin factory in a computer through Omniverse, and conducted experiments in it to change production line configurations, worker movements, robots and warehouse management, and BMW said that using Omniverse is expected to improve production planning efficiency by 30%.
Many companies have fully demonstrated the strength of Omniverse as a platform for real-time collaboration and precision, and let us know that the "metaverse" is not only an ethereal future, but also a present that can effectively improve productivity, and those who master the present are likely to have a future.
CEO Jensen Huang delivered a news-packed keynote at NVIDIA's virtual GTC 2022 conference, March 21-24, with more than 1,400 speakers in more than 900 sessions in accelerated computing, deep learning, data science, digital twins, networking, quantum computing, and computing in the data center, cloud, and edge.
If you're interested in today's topic, Omniverse Metaverse, and want to learn more about the application or technology behind it, then you can't miss GTC.
Interested friends can pay attention to it, and during the event, you will have a chance to win the grand prize if you give a speech of more than 15 minutes! Perhaps, this conference can bring us one step closer to the "metaverse". #gtc22#