Disclosure: Nvidia is a client of the author.
Nvidia's GTC conference was once my favorite conference due to its focus on games; it has become my favorite lecture to predict the future. Today's Nvidia is so different from the company I started working with decades ago that if you put them side by side, the old company would look like a small subsidiary of Nvidia today.
He went from modifying engineering and games to founding the next metaverse. I wonder if Nvidia should have changed its name to Meta instead of letting Facebook steal this tag. Nvidia is interested in advanced robotics, autonomous cars, airplanes and chips (as part of IBM's recent autonomous spaceship test), advanced artificial intelligence, and even medical research (its Jetson module is used to analyze genomics). And this is only a partial list.
At this week's GTC, the company even unveiled Earth 2, a solid-Earth simulation housed on a supercomputer designed to address climate change, but which could become the place where we virtually work, play, and live. In short, they will probably have a bigger impact.
One of the most interesting examples Nvidia offered at GTC involved using the metaverse for collaboration using a fully rendered avatar, getting us closer to where we want to be (and giving me an idea of what the company will do in the future).
Escape from "Uncanny Valley"?
One of the concepts that animators talk about is Uncanny Valley, where an animated version of a character is close to reality but far enough away to make people uncomfortable. Basically, this is why animated movies still look like cartoons; we can create higher levels of realism, but until we make it real enough, the result is insufficient.
Nvidia featured a very high resolution ray traced avatar that could make hand movements, move around a virtual room with legs, and have facial expressions. He represented Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, but the exciting thing was that Jensen himself wasn't exploiting him. He spoke in his voice, but used conversational AI to answer questions like Huang would. It wasn't a photorealistic version of Huang, so it avoided the Uncanny Vally issue, but it was much more realistic than other avatar approaches I've seen.
Bought
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's avatar used conversational AI to answer questions.
Most of the avatars on the market float like legless ghosts and are just too creepy. I can't imagine long meetings with a lot of avatars like that.
Avatars and the future of collaboration
Seeing this element of Huang's keynote made me wonder what Nvidia might show us in the future. For example, one of the problems with video conferencing and video collaboration is that if you pay a lot for a great camera, it tends to benefit the people who watch you. But that doesn't improve your experience, and these HD cameras show just about everything: a receding hairline, your complexion issues, wrinkles, misplaced hair, and any clutter in your clothes or office.
But with real-time photorealistic rendering and someone with the right skills, you could not only create a realistic version of yourself frozen in time to perfection, but also a virtual office using metaverse elements to create an office that would make anyone jealous. . (Go to the 13-minute section of Jensen's speech to see what I'm talking about.)
Here is the interesting part. By using a conversational computer like Huang did, you can have your digital twin attend the meeting and have the system take notes, as if you were there. The system would have access to your schedule, your documented work progress, and everything you produced, allowing you to answer simple questions. We all have to attend meetings where it is necessary to determine the progress of the project or stay on track. Conversational AI could do this even better than you.
With the resulting summary notes, you can save an hour or two of meeting time, get a briefing, in text or verbally, only on the topics that interest you, and use your time on more critical projects. And unless someone asks a probing question that the avatar can't answer, it will appear to other participants that you were there. Even if you received a probing question, the avatar could transcribe and report the request in real time, and you could send an SMS response to keep the illusion going.
To meet or not to meet?
I've often thought that the most productive way to have meetings is to skip them. And Nvidia shows how a digital representation of you can get what you need from a meeting without wasting time on trivial matters.
When I graduated from college, I thought my ideal job would be to spend all day in meetings talking about things. Then I had a job to spend all day talking about things but not doing much; it drove me crazy. Now my idea of a great job is to have someone else attend the meetings so that I can do things.
At GTC, Nvidia gave me hope for my favorite future, which is almost as cool as the four-rotor flying sports car company executives also mentioned. It's like Christmas has come early this year.
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