If you are a gamer, you know very well what NVIDIA is all about: the development of graphics processing units (GPUs) that enable a 3D gaming experience of the highest quality, which is achieved through hardware that incorporates a microchip dedicated exclusively to three-dimensional visualization.
But this hardware, which significantly increases the computational capacity of the computers that incorporate it, is also being used for other applications such as data mining or artificial intelligence. At this point of development, NVIDIA signed a silent agreement with the giant Microsoft on February 15, 2023, which will probably mark a turning point in the future of the Metaverse.
But before we get into the implications of this pact, let’s review NVIDIA’s history in a little more detail.
NVIDIA’s track record
NVIDIA Corporation was born in Silicon Valley back in 1993 with the signature of three partners: Jen-Hsun Huang (current CEO of the company), Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. The first of its GPUs, the NV1, launched in 1995, was a commercial failure. However, the company did not give up and continued to develop more powerful and efficient GPUs. This changed in 1999, when the GeForce 256, the first GPU to include hardware acceleration support for 3D graphics, was released. The GeForce 256, this time, was a commercial success and helped NVIDIA become a leader in the GPU market.
In 2006, the company began a shift to other markets related to scientific applications: it first launched Tesla, the first GPU designed specifically for scientific computing. In 2012, came the GeForce GTX 690, the first card to include hardware acceleration support for machine learning. So, without big headlines, but with steady work and a visionary spirit, NVIDIA became the market leader in machine learning.
Today, NVIDIA has become (with the permission of Apple and its M2 chips) the most important company in the GPU market. The company has developed a wide range of products, including GPUs for gaming, scientific computing, 3D rendering and machine learning. But NVIDIA has also positioned itself in the autonomous car market, where its GPUs are used for in-car computer vision systems.
What is Omniverse?
But hardware is not NVIDIA’s only strength. Also quietly, the California-based company has developed software with multiple programming modules called “Omniverse.” It’s an impressive piece of software that has revolutionized the way industry professionals work and collaborate on 3D design, simulation and visualization projects. By combining technologies such as real-time rendering, accurate physics and artificial intelligence, Omniverse provides a highly immersive and scalable virtual environment that enables highly efficient content creation, exploration and sharing. In addition, Omniverse provides powerful rendering capabilities, enabling photorealistic rendering and an extremely high-quality visual experience in real time.
With Omniverse, it is possible to import and combine data from the most popular software on the market: Unreal, Unity, Maya, Microstation, Blender, Photoshop, Substance Painter or SideFX Houdini, among others. This eliminates, among other things, the barrier of standards that will come in the future to regulate the Metaverse. Omniverse can handle them all…
And… what about the Metaverse?
We were all thinking about Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, how we would have fun and socialize in a virtual world, buying digital land and NFTs and hoping for fantastic wearables to show off there. Then, in November 2022, came the cold water: ChatGPT with its almost perfect natural language, imposed itself as the disruptive novelty leaving the Metaverse quite touched… But the Metaverse was not dead, at least the one that NVIDIA was silently building: its Omniverse, also allied with Microsoft and its powerful cloud.
What is clear is that the Metaverse business has taken a Copernican turn. The Microsoft and NVIDIA partnership will connect our Office 365 with ChatGPT and Omniverse applications, and what was once a game engine has become a powerful simulator that will save not only money but also environmental consequences. Processes will be optimized before they are carried out thanks to these powerful multi-user, multi-platform computing tools.
But there’s more. The alliance of these two giants will see Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, host NVIDIA’s suite of software for building and operating hyper-realistic virtual worlds. An artificial intelligence supercomputing service that enables instant access to the infrastructure and software needed to train advanced generative AI models. Come on ChatGPT’s big brothers are going to beat the natural language programming surprise by far.
The industrial Metaverse
And for proof of these capabilities, here’s a button: BMW and its vehicle factories. The BMW Group has put itself at the forefront of a key new trend in manufacturing: creating digital twins of its factories to optimize designs, robotics systems and logistics years before actual production begins. To do this, it is using NVIDIA software.
The proof is in the electric vehicle plant in Debrecen, Hungary, which will start operations in 2025. With Omniverse, the BMW team aggregates data in massive, high-performance models, connects its software tools and enables live collaboration of multiple users in different locations, making processes optimized. All this is possible from anywhere and on any device. This is the prototype of the NVIDIA and Microsoft Metaverse: the Industrial Metaverse.
Omniverse training
If you want to try out this powerful tool, all you need is a computer with a nice NVIDIA card (the RTX 3070 for example) and Internet access. NVIDIA offers its software for free if you are an individual user and also provides you with a series of online courses, many of them free and others with training certificates, so you can test how far the Omniverse is capable of going. All at nvidia.com.
In conclusion…
Much ado about nothing. Fanfare to Zuckerberg’s Metaverse as AI comes along. Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s Ant continues on its steady and sure, but silent, path, teaming up with one of the big boys to achieve its goals. You never know what the fates may hold, but the way things are looking, I would bet, for the foreseeable future, that NVIDIA and Microsoft take the cake with this Omniverse.
