Posts in category: nVidia AI

Before ringing in the new year, GeForce NOW is taking a look back at a 2023 full of top-notch gaming. Explore GeForce NOW’s year in review, which brought more hit games, improved service features and the launch of the Ultimate membership tier.

Plus, GFN Thursday is raising a toast to the GeForce NOW community by delivering more than 40 new games to stream from the cloud.

Wrapping It Up

It’s been an amazing year of cloud gaming. The launch of the Ultimate tier brought high-performance cloud gaming across North America and Europe, streaming from newly rolled out GeForce RTX 4080 SuperPODs.

For the first time in the cloud, members could stream up to 240 frames per second, or 4K 120 fps on the native PC and Mac apps, and experience support for ultrawide resolutions for the smoothest and most immersive gameplay — all thanks to the powerful NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU architecture.

To prove the power of the cloud, NVIDIA gave gamers the ultimate test of latency on KovaaK’s, a latency-sensitive, first-person-shooter aim trainer.

Gamers competed for top scores on the leaderboard, and the results were staggering — showing a 1.8x improvement in aiming just by playing with an Ultimate membership.

NVIDIA also posed a challenge to Cyberpunk 2077 fans: to play the graphics-intensive game on an unknown system. Players were astonished to discover that they were playing with full ray tracing on a Chromebook with GeForce NOW. NVIDIA even brought the experience to The Game Awards, showing off the power of gaming on a Chromebook with GeForce NOW on a global stage.

With higher-performance streaming came more collaborations with top-quality publishers.

NVIDIA and Microsoft signed a 10-year partnership this year, bringing hit Xbox PC games and over 100 supported PC Game Pass titles to the cloud, with more to come. Members could stream some of the biggest Xbox PC titles, including the Wolfenstein and Forza Horizon franchises, Starfield, and the Ori and Age of Empires series, across devices at high performance for the first time.

With the Microsoft partnership came the first Activision game in the cloud, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. With NVIDIA DLSS 3 and Reflex technologies, Ultimate members can get the highest frame rates and lowest latencies for the smoothest gameplay.

Celebrated publisher Capcom also brought to the cloud some of its top games, including Monster Hunter Rise, Monster Hunter: World and Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen.

The year closed out with a celebration spotlighting  500 NVIDIA RTX-supported games and applications. Over 90 titles with RTX ON are featured on GeForce NOW, easily found on the app’s dedicated RTX ON row, including top games Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, Far Cry 6, Control and more.

The GeForce NOW community put up some impressive numbers, streaming over 250 million hours in the cloud.

And it doesn’t stop there — check back in each week to see what’s in store for GeForce NOW throughout the new year.

In With the New

To celebrate the amazing GeForce NOW community, the cloud gaming service is adding more than 40 Xbox and PC Game Pass titles this week — sure to tide members into the new year.

The best way to experience these games and the over 100 PC Game Pass titles in the cloud is with the latest GeForce NOW membership bundle, which includes a free, three-month PC Game Pass subscription with the purchase of a six-month GeForce NOW Ultimate membership.

Catch the full list of 46 games:

• AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Amazing Cultivation Simulator (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• The Anacrusis (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Age of Wonders 4 (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Before We Leave (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Century: Age of Ashes (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Chorus (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Control (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Darksiders III (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Destroy All Humans! (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Disgaea 4 Complete+ (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Edge of Eternity (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Europa Universalis IV (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Evil Genius 2: World Domination (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Fae Tactics (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Farming Simulator 17 (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• The Forgotten City (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Human Fall Flat (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Lethal League Blaze (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Martha is Dead (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Matchpoint – Tennis Championships (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Maneater (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• The Medium (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Metro Exodus (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Mortal Shell (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• MotoGP 20 (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Moving Out (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• MUSYNX (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Neon Abyss (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Observer: System Redux (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Pathologic 2 (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• The Pedestrian (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Raji: An Ancient Epic (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Recompile (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Remnant: From the Ashes (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Remnant II (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Richman 10 (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Sable (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• SpellForce 3: Soul Harvest (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Surgeon Simulator 2 (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Sword and Fairy 7 (Xbox, available on PC Game Pass)
• Tainted Grail: Conquest (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Tinykin (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Worms W.M.D (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
• Worms Rumble (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)

What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.

2023 was marked by the generative AI boom, representing a new era for how artificial intelligence can be used across industries.

The year’s top videos from the NVIDIA YouTube channel reflect this focus, with popular videos highlighting the technology powering large language models, new platforms for building generative AI applications and how accelerated computing and AI can advance climate science.

And don’t miss replays of NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s event appearances — his GTC keynote in March has garnered 22 million views, making it by far the most-viewed video on the channel.

Tune in to NVIDIA’s top five videos of the year:

Predicting Extreme Weather Risk — Weeks in Advance

Explore in colorful detail how running FourCastNet — an AI framework developed by researchers at NVIDIA, Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley Lab — on NVIDIA GPUs enables quicker, more accurate extreme weather predictions.

Accelerating Carbon Capture and Storage

Buckle up — learn how reservoir engineers are using NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA Modulus and accelerated computing to optimize carbon capture, ensuring long-term storage and safer operations.

Visualizing Global-Scale Climate Data

Seeing is achieving with this stunning demo of the NVIDIA Earth-2 platform, which offers high-resolution climate visualizations for scientists, as well as breathtakingly detailed urban airflow information for architects and city planners.

A Tour of the NVIDIA DGX H100

Presenting the engine behind the large language model breakthrough — the NVIDIA DGX H100. Hear from Huang on why DGX is “the essential instrument of AI.”

Fine-Tuning Generative AI With NVIDIA AI Workbench 

Check out this demo — featuring a multitude of Toy Jensens — to learn how NVIDIA AI Workbench streamlines selecting foundation models, building project environments and fine-tuning models with domain-specific data.

With all the talk of how generative AI is going to change the world, it’s worth looking back on how AI’s already enabled leaps and bounds.

NVIDIA helped automate airport operations, vehicle manufacturing, industrial inspections and more with AI to create smarter spaces in 2023.

Airport AI Takes Off

Toronto Pearson International Airport in June deployed the Zensors AI platform, which uses security cameras to generate spatial data to help optimize operations. Zensors is a member of NVIDIA Metropolis, a partner program for improving operations with visual data and AI, and NVIDIA Inception, a free program that nurtures cutting-edge startups.

The Zensors platform uses anonymized data to count travelers in lines, identify congested areas and predict passenger wait times — and it can send alerts to help speed operations. Other startups have landed in this space to reduce flight delays.

“Zensors is making visual AI easy for all to use,” said Anuraag Jain, the company’s cofounder and head of product and technology.

Inspect Your Gadget

Taiwanese manufacturers like Foxconn Industrial Internet, Pegatron, Quanta and Wistron are embracing NVIDIA Metropolis for Factories to enable automated optical inspections.

Pegatron makes motherboards, smartphones, laptops, game consoles and much more. It uses Metropolis for Factories to support its printed circuit board factories, achieving 99.8% accuracy on its automated optical inspection systems.

How’s that for a smarter workspace.

PepsiCo’s AI Pop

Beverage giant PepsiCo has deployed vision AI from KoiReader Technologies, an NVIDIA Metropolis partner, for efficiency gains in reading warehouse labels.

The startup’s technology is being tapped to train and run the deep learning models behind PepsiCo’s AI label and barcode scanning system.

“If you find the right lever, you could dramatically improve our throughput,” said Greg Bellon, senior director of digital supply chain at PepsiCo.

Driving Digital Production

With NVIDIA Omniverse — a collaborative platform for developing Universal Scene Description applications to design, plan and operate manufacturing and assembly facilities — Mercedes-Benz is using digital twins for production.

Harnessing Omniverse, Mercedes-Benz can interact directly with its suppliers, reducing coordination processes by 50%.

“Using NVIDIA Omniverse and AI, Mercedes-Benz is building a connected, digital-first approach to optimize its manufacturing processes, ultimately reducing construction time and production costs,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at NVIDIA.

Juicing AI for Batteries

Smart spaces often begin in the virtual world.

Siemens showcased an immersive digital model for a look into future FREYR Battery factories, powered by Omniverse.

The industrial giant demoed a blueprint for how teams can harness comprehensive digital twins virtually using models of existing and future plants. The technologies aim to help FREYR meet surging demand for high-density, cost-effective battery cells.

That’s AI to get charged up about.

Learn about building smart spaces with NVIDIA Metropolis. Learn about connecting and developing OpenUSD applications with NVIDIA Omniverse.

NVIDIA’s AI Podcast had its best year yet — with a record-breaking 1.2 million plays in 2023 and each biweekly episode now drawing more than 30,000 listens.

Among tech’s top podcasts, the AI Podcast has racked up more than 200 episodes and nearly 5 million total plays since its debut in 2016.

Listeners across the globe tune in for smart interviews on generative AI, large language models, as well as more offbeat topics like how AI is tackling challenges like building a self-driving baby stroller or discovering alien signals.

Here are five episodes that drew tens of thousands of listeners in 2023:

Gen AI Enables Scientific Leaps

Caltech’s Anima Anandkumar discusses generative AI’s potential to make splashes in the scientific community. The technology can, for example, be fed DNA, RNA, viral and bacterial data to craft a model that understands the language of genomes, or predict extreme-weather events like hurricanes and heat waves.

Class in Session: AI for Learning

The future of online education and the revolutionary impact of AI on the learning experience were the central themes discussed by Anant Agarwal, founder of edX and chief platform officer at 2U. The MIT professor and edtech pioneer also highlighted the implementation of AI-powered features in the edX platform, including a ChatGPT plug-in.

AI Gets Coding

The world increasingly runs on code. Accelerating the work of those who create that code will boost their productivity — and that’s just what AI startup Codeium, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for startups, aims to do. The company’s leaders Varun Mohan and Jeff Wang talk about AI’s transformational role in software development.

Mindful Machine-Making

Julia Stoyanovich, associate professor of computer science and engineering at NYU and director of the university’s Center for Responsible AI, discusses how to make the terms “AI” and “responsible AI” synonymous.

AI for Regeneration, Scar Prevention

Scientists at Matice Biosciences are applying AI to study the regeneration of tissues in animals known as super-regenerators, such as salamanders and planarians. Cofounder Jessica Whited, a regenerative biologist at Harvard University, discusses how the research could unlock new treatments to help humans heal from injuries without scarring.

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Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We’re also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.

NVIDIA’s holiday card — enchanting viewers from the perspective of snuggled-up family members on a couch — warmly depicts a crackling fireplace and an NVIDIA robo-dog by the hearth, all framed by a string of sparkling lights.

In the scene, shown above, characters are decked out in NVIDIA-themed socks and under blankets with the pattern from a custom NVIDIA holiday sweater. Detail-oriented viewers can discover hidden treasures: a virtual toy model of NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang — aka Toy Jensen — NVIDIA iconography in the woodwork and an NVIDIA-branded mug.

Members of NVIDIA’s creative team who are featured in this week’s special In the NVIDIA Studio beat — Alessandro Baldasseroni, Michael Johnson and Rini Sugianto — collaborated to build this 3D scene. They combined 60 years of creative experience, AI-powered features and NVIDIA RTX GPU acceleration in their favorite creative apps to incredible effect.

Plus, the latest version of Reallusion iClone, a real-time 3D animation software, offers a crowd-creation system for populating large worlds in NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform that interconnects 3D workflows for live-sync creation.

Populate Virtual Worlds in NVIDIA Omniverse

Reallusion iClone helps artists bring lifelike movement and realistic facial expressions to 3D models.

iClone version 8.4 builds on these capabilities with a simulation system that provides real-time, customizable crowd animations using Motion Director, a cutting-edge motion-matching and trigger-animation technology.

With it, artists can effortlessly spawn lifelike characters complete with facial expressions, accessories and diverse animation styles. The characters can then be directed to intelligently navigate 3D spaces while avoiding collisions and obstacles.

iClone supports live sync with NVIDIA Omniverse Kit-based apps, allowing users to more seamlessly tap its vast libraries of characters and motions.

iClone version 8.4 is free to download. Learn more about the release details.

Averkin’s at It Again

Seasoned In the NVIDIA Studio artist Andrew Averkin can’t help but spread holiday cheer.

His 3D scene Keep Me Warm seamlessly transitions between the immaculately detailed parts of a holiday-themed room. The Christmas trees, bright lights and children’s toys all feature photorealistic detail sure to move viewers, and calming music adds to the scene’s coziness.

Averkin built Keep Me Warm in NVIDIA Omniverse, which is based on the Universal Scene Description framework, aka OpenUSD.

Such inspirational, winter-themed content is just what the NVIDIA Studio team is looking for in the #WinterArtChallenge. Don’t forget to share winter-themed art with the hashtag on Facebook, Instagram or X for a chance to be featured on NVIDIA Studio and NVIDIA Omniverse social media channels.

Imagine coming across this incredible winter berry on a walk in the snow…

Incredible #WinterArtChallenge submission by @Blendeered (inspired by @wildberrymore‘s music).

Share your winter-themed art using the hashtag for a chance to be featured on our social channels! pic.twitter.com/yfPf6HTRrg

— NVIDIA Studio (@NVIDIAStudio) December 11, 2023

And check out Averkin’s Instagram for more engaging content.

Deck the Halls With Tons of Renders

“The goal was to create something that invoked warmth, joy and holiday spirit,” said Johnson on ideating for this year’s NVIDIA holiday card. “There’s nothing better than being with family, cuddled up on the couch, enjoying each other’s time while wearing something really cozy and relaxing.”

The NVIDIA artists created foreground characters starting with basic elements from the trio’s collective asset library.

Baldasseroni took the lead on modeling and tweaking the characters in ZBrush, working closely with Johnson on the right composition, and even provided preliminary posing to help guide the character feel for a relaxed family portrait.

Moving to Adobe Substance 3D Painter, Baldasseroni created and applied custom textures to the models. His NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU accelerated light and ambient occlusion, baking optimized assets in mere seconds.

Sugianto took on animation work, opening Autodesk Maya where her NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU provided several key advantages.

RTX-accelerated ray tracing and AI-powered denoising with the Autodesk Arnold renderer resulted in highly interactive and photorealistic modeling.

Autodesk Maya also supports third-party GPU-accelerated renderers, such as V-Ray, OctaneRender and Redshift, which gave Sugianto more options to animate the scene.

With the assets beautifully modeled, textured and animated, Johnson imported all files into the NVIDIA Omniverse USD Composer app to add physically accurate properties for the realistic fire, candle lighting and smoke.

“NVIDIA RTX GPU rendering in USD Composer is so fast at enabling quick iterations and different looks,” said Johnson.

Johnson used OpenUSD files in USD Composer, allowing Baldasseroni and Sugianto to review Johnson’s edits in real time with fully ray-traced details. This eliminated the need to download, upload and reformat files to share and consolidate feedback from other stakeholders, saving valuable time and resources.

Johnson then rendered out still images into Adobe Photoshop for final color grading. He further improved visual quality by upscaling the image using the AI-powered, RTX-accelerated Super Resolution feature — which is significantly faster than traditional methods. Throughout his workflow, Johnson could choose from more than 30 GPU-accelerated features, including blur gallery, object selection, liquify, smart sharpen and perspective.

He then uploaded files into Nuke, a visual-effects and video-editing software, for final GPU-accelerated compositing of all the scene’s elements.

Check out Baldasseroni, Johnson and Sugianto on Instagram.

Follow NVIDIA Studio on Facebook, Instagram and X. Access tutorials on the Studio YouTube channel and get updates directly in your inbox by subscribing to the Studio newsletter. 

AI made a splash this year — from Wall Street to the U.S. Congress — driven by a wave of developers aiming to make the world better.

Here’s a look at AI in 2023 across agriculture, natural disasters, medicine and other areas worthy of a cocktail party conversation.

This AI Is on Fire

California has recently seen record wildfires. With scorching heat late into the summer, the state’s crispy foliage becomes a tinderbox that can ignite and quickly blaze out of control. Burning for solutions, developers are embracing AI for early detection.

DigitalPath, based in Chico, California, has refined a convolutional neural network to spot wildfires. The model, run on NVIDIA GPUs, enables thousands of cameras across the state to detect wildfires in real time for the ALERTCalifornia initiative, a collaboration between the University of California, San Diego, and the CAL FIRE wildfire agency.

The mission is near and dear to DigitalPath employees, whose office sits not far from the town of Paradise, where California’s deadliest wildfire killed 85 people in 2018.

“It’s one of the main reasons we’re doing this,” said CEO Jim Higgins. “We don’t want people to lose their lives.”

Earth-Shaking Research

A team from the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of California, Berkeley; and the Technical University of Munich released a paper this year on a new deep learning model for earthquake forecasts.

Shaking up the status quo around the ETAS model standard, developed in 1988, the new RECAST model, trained on NVIDIA GPUs, is capable of using larger datasets and holds promise for making better predictions during earthquake sequences.

“There’s a ton of room for improvement within the forecasting side of things,” said Kelian Dascher-Cousineau, one of the paper’s authors.

AI’s Day in the Sun

Verdant, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, is supporting organic farming. The startup develops AI for tractor implements that can weed, fertilize and spray, providing labor support while lowering production costs for farmers and boosting yields.

The NVIDIA Jetson Orin-based robots-as-a-service business provides farmers with metrics on yield gains and chemical reduction. “We wanted to do something meaningful to help the environment,” said Lawrence Ibarria, chief operating officer at Verdant.

Living the Dream 

Ge Dong is living out her childhood dream, following in her mother’s footsteps by pursuing physics. She cofounded Energy Singularity, a startup that aims to lower the cost of building a commercial tokamak — which can cost billions of dollars —for fusion energy development.

It brings the promise of cleaner energy.

“We’ve been using NVIDIA GPUs for all our research — they’re one of the most important tools in plasma physics these days,” she said.

Gimme Shelter

Chaofeng Wang, a University of Florida assistant professor of artificial intelligence, is enlisting deep learning and images from Google Street View to evaluate urban buildings. By automating the process, the work is intended to assist governments in supporting building structures and post-disaster recovery.

“Without NVIDIA GPUs, we wouldn’t have been able to do this,” Wang said. “They significantly accelerate the process, ensuring timely results.”

AI Predicts Covid Variants

A Gordon Bell prize-winning model, GenSLMs has shown it can generate gene sequences closely resembling real-world variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. Researchers trained the model using NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU-powered supercomputers, including NVIDIA’s Selene, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Perlmutter and Argonne’s Polaris system.

“The AI’s ability to predict the kinds of gene mutations present in recent COVID strains — despite having only seen the Alpha and Beta variants during training — is a strong validation of its capabilities,” said Arvind Ramanathan, lead researcher on the project and a computational biologist at Argonne.

Jetson-Enabled Autonomous Wheelchair

Kabilan KB, an undergraduate student from the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences in Coimbatore, India, is developing an NVIDIA Jetson-enabled autonomous wheelchair. To help boost development, he’s been using NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for building and operating 3D tools and applications based on the OpenUSD framework.

“Using Omniverse for simulation, I don’t need to invest heavily in prototyping models for my robots, because I can use synthetic data generation instead,” he said. “It’s the software of the future.”

Digital Twins for Brain Surgery

Atlas Meditech is using the MONAI medical imaging framework and the NVIDIA Omniverse 3D development platform to help build AI-powered decision support and high-fidelity surgery rehearsal platforms — all in an effort to improve surgical outcomes and patient safety.

“With accelerated computing and digital twins, we want to transform this mental rehearsal into a highly realistic rehearsal in simulation,” said Dr. Aaron Cohen-Gadol, founder of the company.

Keeping AI on Energy 

Artificial intelligence is helping optimize solar and wind farms, simulate climate and weather, and support power grid reliability and other areas of the energy market.

Check out this installment of the I AM AI video series to learn about how NVIDIA is enabling these technologies and working with energy-conscious collaborators to drive breakthroughs for a cleaner, safer, more sustainable future.

AI Can See Clearly Now

Many patients in lower- and middle-income countries lack access to cataract surgery because of a shortage of ophthalmologists. But more than 2,000 doctors a year in lower-income countries can now treat cataract blindness — the world’s leading cause of blindness —using GPU-powered surgical simulation with the help of nonprofit HelpMeSee.

“We’re lowering the barrier for healthcare practitioners to learn these specific skills that can have a profound impact on patients,” said Bonnie An Henderson, CEO of the New York-based nonprofit.

Waste Not, Want Not

Afresh, based in San Francisco, helps stores reduce food waste. The startup has developed machine learning and AI models using data on fresh produce to help grocers make informed inventory-purchasing decisions. It has also launched software that enables grocers to save time and increase data accuracy with inventory tracking.

“The most impactful thing we can do is reduce food waste to mitigate climate change,” said Nathan Fenner, cofounder and president of Afresh, on the NVIDIA AI podcast.

Time to gear up, hunters — Capcom’s Monster Hunter: World joins the GeForce NOW library, bringing members the ultimate hunting experience on any device.

It’s all part of an adventurous week, with nearly a dozen new games joining the cloud gaming service.

A Whole New World

Join the Fifth Fleet on an epic adventure to the New World, a land full of monstrous creatures, in the acclaimed action role-playing game (RPG) Monster Hunter: World. It’s the latest in the series to join the cloud, following Monster Hunter Rise.

Members can unleash their inner hunter and slay ferocious monsters in a living, breathing ecosystem. Explore the unique landscape and encounter diverse monster inhabitants in ferocious hunting battles. Hunt alone or with up to three other players, and use materials collected from fallen foes to craft new gear and take on bigger, badder beasts.

Step up to the Quest Board and hunt monsters in the cloud at up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second as an Ultimate member — or discover the New World at ultrawide resolutions. Members don’t need to wait for downloads or worry about storage space, and can take the action with them across nearly all devices.

Surprise!

One of the best ways to stream top PC games on the go — even the stunning neon lights of Cyberpunk 2077 — is with a Chromebook Plus. NVIDIA invited Cyberpunk 2077 fans well-versed on the graphics-intensive game to try it out on an unknown, hidden system.

They were shocked to realize they were playing on a Chromebook Plus with GeForce NOW’s Ultimate tier.

NVIDIA brought the same activation to attendees of The Game Awards, one of the industry’s most-watched award shows.

With the ability to stream from powerful GeForce RTX 4080 GPU-powered servers in the cloud with the Ultimate tier — paired with the cloud gaming Chromebook Plus’ high refresh rates, high-resolution displays, gaming keyboards, fast WiFi 6 connectivity and immersive audio — it’s no surprise participants gave the same surprised and delighted response.

To experience the power of gaming on a Chromebook with GeForce NOW, Google and NVIDIA are offering Chromebook owners three free months of a premium GeForce NOW membership. Find more details on how to redeem the offer on the Chromebook Perks page.

Festival of Games

The latest update from opular open-world action RPG Genshin Impact from miHoYo is now available for members to stream. It brings two new characters, new events and a whole host of new features. Get to know the Geo Claymore character Navia, as well as Chevreuse, a new Pyro Polearm user, and more during the Fontinalia Festival event.

Don’t miss the 11 newly supported games joining the GeForce NOW library this week:

• Blasphemous 2 (Epic Games Store)
• Bloons TD Battles (Steam)
• Dark Envoy (Steam)
• Figment 2: Creed Valley (Epic Games Store)
• Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure (Steam)
• Loddlenaut (Steam)
• Monster Hunter: World (Steam)
• Nova-Life: Amboise (Steam)
• RIDE 5 (Epic Games Store)
• The Smurfs 2 – The Prisoner of the Green Stone (Steam)
• Tintin Reporter – Cigars of the Pharaoh (Steam)

And there’s still time to give the gift of cloud gaming with the latest membership bundle, which includes a free, three-month PC Game Pass subscription with the purchase of a six-month GeForce NOW Ultimate membership.

What are you planning to play this weekend? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.

pic.twitter.com/BJvPPrW3VW

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) December 20, 2023

Outside the glare of the klieg lights that ChatGPT commanded this year, a troupe of autonomous machines nudged the frontiers of robotics forward.

Here are six that showed special prowess — swimming, diving, gripping, seeing, strolling and flying through 2023.

A Media Darling at CES

Ella — a smart stroller from startup Glüxkind Technologies, of Vancouver, Canada — kicked off the year when it was named an honoree in the CES 2023 Innovation Awards.

The canny carriage uses computer vision running on the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform to follow parents. Its AI-powered abilities, like smart braking and a rock-my-baby mode, captured the attention of media outlets like Good Morning America and The Times of London as well as an NVIDIA AI Podcast interview with its husband-and-wife cofounders.

A member of NVIDIA Inception, a free program for cutting-edge startups, Glüxkind was one of seven companies with NVIDIA-powered products recognized at the Las Vegas event in January. They included:

• John Deere for its fully autonomous tractor,
• AGRIST for its robot that automatically harvests bell peppers,
• Inception member Skydio for its drone that can fly at a set distance and height without manual intervention,
• Neubility, another Inception member, for its self-driving delivery robot,
• Seoul Robotics, a partner in the NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI software, for its Level 5 Control Tower that can turn standard vehicles into self-driving cars, and
• WHILL for its one-person vehicle that automatically guides a user inside places like airports or hospitals.

Dexterous Food Packer

Inception startup Soft Robotics, of Bedford, Mass., introduced its mGripAI system to an $8 trillion food industry hungry for automation. It combines 3D vision and AI to grasp delicate items such as chicken wings, attracting investors that include Tyson Foods and Johnsonville.

Soft Robotics uses the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and NVIDIA Isaac Sim robotics simulator to create 3D renderings of chicken parts on conveyor belts or in bins. With help from AI and the ray-tracing capabilities of NVIDIA RTX technology, they help the robot gripper handle as many as 100 picks per minute, even under glare or changing light conditions.

“We’re all in on Omniverse and Isaac Sim, and that’s been working great for us,” said David Weatherwax, senior director of software engineering at Soft Robotics.

A Keen Eye in the Factory

In a very different example of industrial digitalization, leading electronics manufacturer Quanta is inspecting the quality of its products using the TM25S, an AI-enabled robot from its subsidiary, Techman Robot.

Using Omniverse, Techman built a digital twin of the inspection robot — as well as the product to be inspected — in Isaac Sim. Programming the robot in simulation reduced time spent on the task by over 70%, compared to programming manually on the real robot.

Then, with powerful optimization tools in Isaac Sim, Techman explored a massive number of program options in parallel on NVIDIA GPUs. The end result, shown in the video below, was an efficient solution that reduced the cycle time of each inspection by 20%.

Sailing the Seas for Data Science

For its part, Saildrone, an Inception startup in Alameda, Calif., created uncrewed watercraft that can cost-effectively gather data for science, fisheries, weather forecasting and more. NVIDIA Jetson modules process data streams from their sensors, some with help from NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI software such as NVIDIA DeepStream, a development kit for intelligent video analytics.

The video below shows how three of its smart sailboats are helping evaluate ocean health around the Hawaiian Islands.

Destination: Mars

The next stop for one autonomous vehicle may be the red planet.

Caltech’s Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot, or M4, can configure itself to walk, fly or drive at speeds up to 40 mph (video below). An M42 version is now under development at NASA as a Mars rover candidate and has attracted interest for other uses like reconnaissance in fire zones.

Since releasing a paper on it in Nature Communications, the team has been inundated with proposals for the shape-shifting drone built on the NVIDIA Jetson platform.

Delivery Drone Flies High

The year ended on a high note with San Francisco-based Zipline announcing its delivery drones flew more than 55 million miles and made more than 800,000 deliveries since the company’s start in 2011. Zipline now completes one delivery every 70 seconds, globally.

That’s a major milestone for the Inception startup, the field it’s helping pioneer and the customers who can receive everything from pizza to vitamins 7x faster than by truck.

Zipline’s latest drone uses two Jetson Orin NX modules. It can carry eight pounds of cargo for 10 miles at up to 70 mph to deliver packages in single-digit minutes while reducing carbon emissions 97% compared to gasoline-based delivery vehicles.

Machines That Inspire, Amuse

Individual makers designed two autonomous vehicles this year worth special mentions.

Kabilan KB, a robotics developer and student in Coimbatore, India, built an autonomous wheelchair using Jetson to run computer vision models that find and navigate a path to a user’s desired destination. The undergrad at the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences aspires to one day launch a robotics startup.

Finally, an engineering manager in Copenhagen who’s a self-described Star Wars fanatic designed an AI-powered droid based on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit. Goran Vuksic shared his step-by-step technical guide, so others can build their own sci-fi companions.

More than 6,500 companies and 1.2 million developers — as well as a community of makers and enthusiasts — use the NVIDIA Jetson and Isaac platforms for edge AI and robotics.

To get a look at where autonomous machines will go next, see what’s coming at CES in 2024.

Thomson Reuters, the global content and technology company, is transforming the legal industry with generative AI.

In the latest episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz spoke with Thomson Reuters Chief Product Officer David Wong about its potential — and implications.

Many of Thomson Reuters offerings for the legal industry either address an information retrieval problem or help generate written content.

It has aN AI-driven digital solution that enables law practitioners to search laws and cases intelligently within different jurisdictions. It also provides AI-powered tools that are set to be integrated with commonly used products like Microsoft 365 to automate the time-consuming processes of drafting and analyzing legal documents.

These technologies increase the productivity of legal professionals, enabling them to focus their time on higher-value work. According to Wong, ultimately these tools also have the potential to help deliver better access to justice.

To address ethical concerns, the company has created publicly available AI development guidelines, as well as privacy and data protection policies. And it’s participating in the drafting of ethical guidelines for the industries it serves.

There’s still a wide range of reactions surrounding AI use in the legal field, from optimism about its potential to fears of job replacement. But Wong underscored that no matter what the outlook, “it is very likely that professionals that use AI are going to replace professionals that don’t use AI.”

Looking ahead, Thomson Reuters aims to further integrate generative AI, as well as retrieval-augmented generation techniques into its flagship research products to help lawyers synthesize, read and respond to complicated technical and legal questions. Recently, Thomson Reuters acquired Casetext, which developed the first AI legal assistant, CoCounsel.

In 2024 Thomson Reuters is building on this with the launch of an AI assistant that will be the interface across Thomson Reuters products with GenAI capabilities, including those in other fields such as tax and accounting.

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Editor’s note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how artists, developers and enterprises can transform their workflows using the latest advances in OpenUSD and NVIDIA Omniverse.

3D designers and creators are embracing Universal Scene Description, aka OpenUSD, to transform their workflows.

Creative software company Foundry’s latest release of Nuke, a powerful compositing tool for visual effects (VFX), is bringing increased support for OpenUSD, a framework that provides a unified and extensible ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating and collaborating within 3D worlds.

With advanced compositing and improved interoperability capabilities, artists are showcasing the immense potential of Nuke and OpenUSD for visual storytelling.

Bringing 3D Visions to Life With Nuke and OpenUSD

YouTuber Jacob Zirkle is one such 3D artist.

Inspired by his 10th watch through the Star Wars films, Zirkle wanted to create a sci-fi ship of his own. He first combined computer graphics elements in Blender and Unreal Engine before using USD to bring the scene into Nuke for compositing.

Zirkle’s ship, built using Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine and USD Composer.

OpenUSD was the glue that held his workflow together.

“Usually, I have to deal with multiple, varying file types in my VFX pipeline, and as soon as something gets updated, it can be a real pain to apply the change across the board,” Zirkle said. “But because I was using the same OpenUSD file for all of my programs, I could save the file once, and changes get automatically propagated through the pipeline — saving me a ton of time.”

Edward McEvenue, an associate creative director at NVIDIA, is using OpenUSD and Nuke to create his short film with the working title: “Dare to Dream.”

Through the project, McEvenue hopes to visualize aspects of automated manufacturing. He uses Autodesk 3ds Max and SideFX Houdini for 3D scene creation, Chaos V-Ray for rendering arbitrary output variables and extended dynamic range sequences, and Nuke for compositing elements for final renders.

OpenUSD helps streamline data transfer between applications, speeding the iteration process. “Nuke’s USD capabilities allow me to seamlessly transition 3D assets between digital content-creation apps, providing a powerful tool for achieving advanced compositing techniques,” he said.

Other NVIDIA creatives have integrated OpenUSD and Nuke into their 3D workflows. A team of 10 artists developed a fully OpenUSD-based pipeline and custom tooling on NVIDIA Omniverse — a development platform for building OpenUSD-based tools and applications — to bring to life the “Da Vinci Workshop,” a project to inspire greater OpenUSD use among pipeline developers.

The artists also used Adobe Substance Painter, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, DaVinci Resolve, SideFX Houdini, Pixelogic Zbrush and Omniverse USD Composer. OpenUSD served as the backbone of the team’s internal pipeline, offering the flexibility needed to collaborate across applications with ease.

The “Da Vinci Workshop” OpenUSD dataset is now available on the Omniverse launcher — free for developers and artists.

Foundry Nuke representatives, Omniverse community members and the NVIDIA creative team recently joined a livestream to discuss their 3D workflows and the impact of OpenUSD. Learn more by watching the replay:

Powering Digital Workflows With OpenUSD

The 15.0 and 14.1 updates to Nuke bring significant workflow enhancements to those working with OpenUSD.

The updated GeoMerge node now offers four new modes: Merge Layers, Duplicate Prims, Flatten Layers and Flatten to Single Layer. These give users greater control over geometry and OpenUSD layers, allowing for quick merging of complex structures, the duplication of workflows and more effective layer management.

The OpenUSD-based 3D system introduced in Nuke 14.0 enables users to handle large, intricate scenes with greater ease. And the new Scene Graph Popup feature in Nuke 15.0 allows users to easily filter through 3D scene data, reducing time and energy needed to spend searching for specific assets.

In addition, the main 3D scene graph now includes a search and filter feature, simplifying workspace navigation.

Foundry is also embracing OpenUSD across its other products, including the latest updates to Katana 7.0, which boost pipeline efficiency by integrating USD-native workflows already aligned with Nuke’s 3D system architecture.

Get Plugged In to the World of OpenUSD 

NVIDIA and Foundry are both members of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD), an organization dedicated to an open-source future using the powerful framework. To learn more, explore the AOUSD forum and check out these resources on OpenUSD.

Share your Nuke and Omniverse work as part of the latest community #WinterArtChallenge. Use the hashtag for a chance to be featured on the @NVIDIAStudio and @NVIDIAOmniverse social channels.

Winter has returned and so has our #WinterArtChallenge!

Share your winter-themed art (like this incredible one created on an RTX GPU by @rafianimates) using the hashtag for a chance to be featured on our social channels!

We can’t wait to see what you create! pic.twitter.com/Ml4cUAUgW3

— NVIDIA Studio (@NVIDIAStudio) December 4, 2023

Get started with NVIDIA Omniverse by downloading the standard license free, access OpenUSD resources, and learn how Omniverse Enterprise can connect your team. Stay up to date on Instagram, Medium and Twitter. For more, join the Omniverse community on the  forums, Discord server, Twitch and YouTube channels.