Huang Jen-hoon thought about the metacosm five years ago? Nvidia: Not for the metaverse's sake

In the past year, the metaverse has become a hot concept, known as the "metaverse creation tool" Nvidia Omniverse has broken the circle and has been widely concerned, and the "digital Huang Jenxun", which has caused a hot discussion at the GTC conference, is made of Omniverse. In reality, however, Omniverse did not first appear because of the metaverse, but before the metaverse became a hot word.

So why did NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang start advancing the Omniverse project five years ago? What is the metaphor of a "digital wormhole"? What exactly can Omniverse do?

After the meta-universe caught fire, "the first feeling is that our workload has doubled or tripled," He Zhan, business development manager of Omniverse in NVIDIA China, joked in an interview with reporters including the www.thepaper.cn.

Nvidia launched Omniverse, a real-time 3D design collaboration tool, in 2019, while Jen-Hsun Huang came up with the idea and advanced implementation five years ago. Richard Kerris, vice president of platform development at Omniverse, mentioned at the GTC conference in April 2021 that Nvidia has spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars on it.

Huang Jenxun once introduced at the 2021 GTC conference, "Omniverse allows individuals to simulate and create a shared 3D virtual world that obeys the laws of physics." In its website, NVIDIA describes Omniverse as "a platform that connects the 3D world to a shared virtual world," completing real-time 3D design collaboration and virtual world simulations, consolidating graphics, AI, simulation, and scalable computing into one platform.

So what can Omniverse do?

For example, it can solve the problem of base station layout design. How to invest the minimum and most efficient base station is a very complex scientific problem, Omniverse can help it complete the 5G base station digital twin simulation, build a data model of the flow of people, quantity, time distribution in each place, complete the city simulation and AI algorithm evaluation. For example, when a wildfire occurs, the spread path and scale of the wildfire can be predicted by omniverse simulation, so as to obtain the best strategy for suppressing the fire.

Why did the metaverse tools that existed when there were no metacosm, be created?

In its simplest understanding, Omniverse is essentially a platform that blends otherwise disconnected software.

He Zhan gave an example, architectural designers will use a lot of software tools when doing interior decoration rendering, and these software do not belong to the same software company, the data is not connected to each other, and the format conversion is difficult. The Omniverse platform allows different tools (software) to operate simultaneously in one interface, saving a lot of time.

So why did Nvidia, an ARTIFICIAL computing company that defined GPUs and revolutionized parallel computing, think of launching Omniverse?

"Four or five years ago, we began to think about the digital virtual world (metaverse) that everyone calls in the future, and the construction of various digital assets such as people, things, and scenes in that world requires designers, artists, artists and other creatives. They have always been NVIDIA users, and our iterations of technology are based on insight into their pain points. He Zhan said.

In 2017, Nvidia released its first AR/VR video, and from that time on, Nvidia began to show off Omniverse's initial ideas. In 2018, Nvidia released real-time ray technology, which combines real-time ray tracing with AI for landing applications.

"Real-time ray tracing technology gives us a new possibility that could add $200-300 billion to the creative market and encourage designers to make their work with such techniques." With graphical visualization and AI, it was later found that it could also be combined with the physics engine and XR technology that had been made before, and then the idea of making this technology a platform was further derived. The later release of Omniverse was the result of various rendering technology enhancements. He Zhan said.

Returning to the original question, he Zhan summed up the surging news (www.thepaper.cn) as to why Omniverse appeared in the first place, "Omniverse is not metaverse for the sake of metaverse, but has come to this step in the process of continuous iteration of technology." In different time periods, the application of customers, several major types of technology are mature, then we think that the future may use these technologies to create a new digital 3D world, or metacosm, the platform is naturally labeled as a metacosm. ”

An interesting problem is that before the metaverse concept was not hot, Omniverse was associated with the metaverse a lot of the time, and as the metaverse concept became popular, Nvidia's official press release began to avoid using the metaverse and emphasized the 3D virtual world more. At the same time, during the reporter's interview, several of Nvidia's interviewees have also tried to avoid being completely linked to the metaverse.

A person close to Nvidia replied, "The concept of metaversity is still in the process of being nurtured and growing, just like when the Internet was just born, there is no way to stand at that point and look at today 20 years later." About the metaverse is now more conceptual content, each manufacturer will tell their own metaverse dreams, and some of these metaverse dreams are more realistic, some will be described in a utopian or very sci-fi perspective, and have not really landed. When the entire industry is discussing the metaverse, Nvidia will want to return to the technology itself, hoping that more developers and creators will see what Omniverse can bring to them, and the core is that technology will change their work and creation. ”

To summarize the functions that Omniverse can achieve, the first is to integrate different tools (software), and the second is to process a large amount of data and do real-time rendering, such as CCTV's "Flying to the Moon 2" documentary to process 3TB of data to complete the lunar simulation. In the third category, AI is involved, such as meteorological simulation, which analyzes the direction of hurricanes in a graphical visual way.

"The technical capabilities to realize the metacosm must include a data center-level computing power platform," He Zhan said. For example, Earth-2 digital twins simulate the climate state of the Earth in 2035 and 2060, which require huge computing power.

Why does Jen-Hsun Huang call Omniverse a "digital wormhole"? What is the metaphor?

"Omniverse is very different from game engines in that it's designed for data center scale and is expected to one day reach global data scale. Omniverse is based on USD (Universal Scene Description), which is essentially a digital wormhole. Connecting people and computers to Omniverse and connecting one Omniverse world to another, USD to Omniverse is to OMNIverse like HTML web pages to websites," said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at GTC in the second half of 2021.

First of all, it is necessary to understand USD (General Scenario Description), "the original intention of USD is to solve the incompatibility between different manufacturers and different software data formats, or the need to import and export repeatedly," Song Yiming, senior solution architect of NVIDIA, told the surging news (www.thepaper.cn).

USD was first proposed by the animation company Pixar. In the animation production process, different divisions of labor involve different design software tools, so when working together, it is necessary to carry out tedious work such as format conversion. Later, Pixar proposed a unified scene format USD and opened it in 2016, so that the 3D content produced by different software can use the USD format uniformly, and "How to Train Your Dragon 3: The Hidden World" was produced in this way.

"Taking PPT as an example, there may be 5 people opening the same PPT, a common data stream, and one person's changes can be seen by another person immediately. Based on the USD format, in a three-dimensional scene, one person's changes can be seen by another person instantly, facilitating communication and collaboration. Song Yiming said.

Wormholes are based on a special solution of Einstein's field equations, which are speculative structures that connect different points in space-time. You can think of a wormhole as a tunnel with two ends at different points in space-time (different locations, different points in time, or both).

Wormhole simulation

The metaphor of a "digital wormhole" in the case of a BMW digital twin factory may be more direct.

Song Yiming believes that the main purpose of digital twins is to put things that are difficult to achieve in the real world, or need to be achieved at a high cost, in the virtual world at a smaller cost. In BMW's digital twin factory, you can build a production line, or test the car in a simulated way, and by building a model to see the physical effects and the characteristics of the real output, you can know at a very low cost whether the solution is feasible, and then build such a production line in the real world.

In this way, Omniverse becomes a "digital wormhole" between the virtual 3D world and the real world, through which the virtual and real worlds are interconnected and interact.