Nvidia Unveils Virtual Human Builder for Metaverse Characters
Nvidia has introduced a new platform for building virtual beings to interact with in the digital realms of the metaverse, which Nvidia refers to as its Omniverse. The Nvidia Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) provides a collection of AI models and related tools for users to design the AI creations that will populate their virtual worlds, including synthetic voices and visual media.
ACE Synthesized
The cloud-based ACE catalog streamlines building virtual beings and applies Nvidia’s computing power to setting up and embedding the AI avatars in digital worlds. The resulting synthetic being can converse in multiple languages, offering recommendations based on the conversation and even process its digital environment enough to interact with objects around it. The system used Nvidia’s Unified Compute Framework of software products, including the Riva speech AI technology and the NeMo Megatron natural language understanding using large language models. The AI is powerful enough that Nvidia claims it could pass the Turing Test, the idea posited by early AI pioneer Alan Turing of an AI capable of fooling a human into believing they are talking to another human and not a synthetic model of a human being.
“Our industry has been on a decades-long journey teaching computers to communicate and carry out complex tasks with ease that humans take for granted,” Nvidia Omniverse and simulation technology vice president Rev Lebaredian said. “Nvidia ACE brings this within reach. ACE combines many sophisticated AI technologies, allowing developers to create digital assistants that are on a path to pass the Turing test.”
Populating the Omniverse
ACE is the next step in Nvidia’s metaverse project. The Omniverse began with scene-setting and building out the virtual landscape. Ace will help Nvidia and its partners populate it with the AI characters that make it more than just an empty digital wasteland. After two decades of development and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, Nvidia has a lot riding on the Omniverse but is reporting positive results so far, including almost 100,000 downloads from creators during its initial beta playing with its graphical and AI tools. The platform is built to encourage teamwork and simulation across a broad range of manufacturing and experiential products encompassing everything from building cars and buildings to editing a movie or designing a video game. The free Omniverse platform announced this year is starting to put it all together. That’s why Nvidia also announced new ways to build objects in the Omniverse using SDKs that simplify making objects that obey real-world physics using what the company calls neural graphics to make it look right to human users. ACE will bring virtual people to interact with those virtual objects in the virtual world and make Nvidia a leader in the metaverse and synthetic media.
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