Posts in category: nVidia AI

Sustainability isn’t just a choice for consumers to make. It’s an opportunity for companies to lead.

AI startup Heartdub seams together fashion and technology to let designers and creators display physical fabrics and garments virtually — and help clothing companies achieve zero-waste manufacturing.

The company’s software digitizes textiles and then simulates how clothes look on the human body. This virtual design verification lessens the amount of physical samples needed, reducing waste from excess fabric, and helps minimize unsold inventory.

Based in Beijing, Heartdub is a member of NVIDIA Inception, a program designed to nurture startups revolutionizing industries with advancements in AI and data sciences. NVIDIA Inception helps startups during critical stages of product development, prototyping and deployment by providing free benefits such as go-to-market support and access to technology expertise.

“As a member of NVIDIA Inception, Heartdub hopes to leverage the resources, support and platform provided by NVIDIA to accelerate the implementation and extension of design verification and virtual showrooms,” said Li Ruohao, chief technology officer at Heartdub.

Zipping Up a Solution to Fabric Waste

Sampling fabrics and other materials is a costly, involved process for brand owners. It can slow the distribution of fashion information throughout the supply chain. And finished products may not look or perform the way consumers want, or may arrive too late to meet the latest trends.

Heartdub offers its customers Heartdub Materials, a physics engine comprising a large set of laboratory-grade textiles data which replicates the physical properties of materials. Inside the application, digitized material behaves as it would in the real world by accounting for texture, weight and movement.

The engine can reduce R&D costs by half, marketing costs by 70 percent and lead times by 90 percent for fabric manufacturers and brand owners, according to Li.

By verifying designs at near zero cost, Heartdub Materials can produce digital, ready-to-wear garments based on clothing patterns. Designers are able to select the texture, pattern and design online, allowing fabric manufacturers to complete preorder presentations at no cost.

These pieces can be showcased and purchased directly through virtual demos and fashion shows hosted by Heartdub One, the company’s database of clothing and avatars.

With Heartdub One, consumers can see how clothes fit on their specific size and shape by building their own digital human based on their particular measurements.

Fashionably Early 

Powered by NVIDIA HDR InfiniBand networking, the Heartdub Materials physics engine boasts a speed of 200 Gbps, improving data transmission efficiency nearly 100-fold.

Taking advantage of NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 GPUs and high-speed interconnect technology, Heartdub Materials can easily simulate complex virtual world environments and efficiently process complex ray-tracing and visual computing workloads.

This enables collaboration across the industry, making it possible to complete the process from fabric selection, ready-to-wear design and review to pattern making and production, all virtually.

“AI will revolutionize the fashion industry, and Heartdub Materials is just the beginning,” said Li. “NVIDIA solutions have solved the technical challenges in graphics, allowing us to continue to provide new experiences and create more application scenarios for the fashion industry and its customers.”

Apply to join NVIDIA Inception. 

Modern workloads such as AI and machine learning are putting tremendous pressure on traditional IT infrastructure.

Enterprises that want to stay ahead of these changes can now register to participate in an early access of Project Monterey, an initiative to dramatically improve the performance, manageability and security of their environments.

VMware, Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are collaborating on this project to evolve the architecture for the data center, cloud and edge to one that is software-defined and hardware-accelerated to address the changing application requirements.

AI and other compute-intensive workloads require real-time data streaming analysis, which, along with growing security threats, puts a heavy load on server CPUs. The increased load significantly increases the percentage of processing power required to run tasks that aren’t an integral part of application workloads. This reduces data center efficiency and can prevent IT from meeting its service-level agreements.

Project Monterey is leading the shift to advanced hybrid-cloud data center architectures, which benefit from hypervisor and accelerated software-defined networking, security and storage.

With access to Project Monterey’s preconfigured clusters, enterprises can explore the evolution of VMware Cloud Foundation and take advantage of the disruptive hardware capabilities of the Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 server equipped with NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPU (data processing unit).

Selected functions that used to run on the core CPU are offloaded, isolated and accelerated on the DPU to support new possibilities, including:

• Improved performance for application and infrastructure services
• Enhanced visibility, application security and observability
• Offloaded firewall capabilities
• Improved data center efficiency and cost for enterprise, edge and cloud.

Interested organizations can register for the NVIDIA Project Monterey early access program. Learn more about NVIDIA and VMware’s collaboration to modernize the data center.

If AI, data science, graphics or robotics is your jam, stream the NVIDIA AI Essentials Learning Series this summer.

These intro-level courses provide foundational knowledge to students and early-career developers looking to broaden their areas of expertise. The free series includes over a dozen sessions — each less than an hour long — on topics including conversational AI, ray tracing and robotics fundamentals.

For a deeper dive, register for daylong hands-on courses from the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute and earn a certificate of competency to boost your resume. To date, DLI has trained more than 300,000 developers through an extensive catalog of self-paced and instructor-led courses and workshops.

Besides picking up new skills to boost your career journey, there are summer sweepstakes at stake: For every 30 minutes a participant watches the learning series, they earn an entry to win a DLI book and free registration codes for self-paced courses.

For those who register for DLI courses on deep learning, accelerated data science and AI on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, we’re upping the game. Upon successful completion of one or more of these courses, participants will be entered to win an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU in addition to three DLI registration codes and the book.

Here’s a taste of what students, educators and early-career technologists will find in the learning series.

Deep Learning Demystified

This talk covers what deep learning is, what it’s good for and why it’s such a powerful technology. Will Ramey, senior director and global head of developer programs at NVIDIA, talks through the different types of neural networks and explains how they’re trained, optimized and deployed in industries like healthcare and energy. He also discusses some of the challenges organizations face when adopting deep learning.

Ray Tracing in One Weekend

Ray tracing brings stunning, realistic visuals to the movie and gaming industries — but how does it work? In this session, NVIDIA researcher Pete Shirley guides viewers through the process of writing code to generate a ray-traced image of a 3D scene. As he goes, Shirley explains key concepts that form the foundation of ray tracing.

Conversational AI Demystified 

Building a conversational AI model requires developers to achieve two key features: high accuracy and low latency. This session provides an overview of conversionational AI models for automatic speech recognition, natural language processing and text-to-speech. Meriem Bendris, a solution architect at NVIDIA, shares how to train and fine-tune these models using NVIDIA NeMo, the Transfer Learning Toolkit and the NVIDIA Riva application framework.

Jetson Nano: From Zero to Hero in 20 Minutes

Learn how to get started from scratch with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB developer kit — even if you’re not a developer. This crash course, led by NVIDIA’s Asier Arranz Jiminez, walks through the process from installation to inference with an AI model that detects vehicles, roads and pedestrians.

To get started, visit the NVIDIA AI Essentials Learning Series homepage. Thousands more talks are available to stream free through NVIDIA On-Demand.

There are more AI startups in healthcare than any other single industry. The number of AI startups in media and entertainment is about the same as that in retail. More than one in 10 of all AI startups is based in California.

How do we know this? NVIDIA Inception, our acceleration platform for AI startups, has now surpassed 8,500 members. That’s about two-thirds of the total number of AI startups worldwide, as estimated by Pitchbook. With total cumulative funding of over $60 billion and members in 90 countries, NVIDIA Inception is one of the largest AI startup ecosystems in the world.

With this type of scale, NVIDIA Inception is more than a singular program; it’s a reflection of the larger startup landscape. And there’s plenty that can be inferred based on this.

Data Across 8,500+ Startups

NVIDIA Inception figures show the United States leads the world in terms of both the number of AI startups, representing nearly 27 percent, and the amount of secured funding, accounting for over $27 billion in cumulative funding.

Of U.S.-based startups, 42 percent were based in California — more than one in 10 AI startups is based in the state — with 29 percent in the San Francisco Bay Area. This underscores the continued draw of the region for startup founders and VC funding.

Following the U.S. is China, in terms of both funding and company stage, with 12 percent of NVIDIA Inception members based there. India comes in third at 7 percent, with the United Kingdom right behind at 6 percent.

Taken together, AI startups based in the U.S., China, India and the U.K. account for just over half of all startups in NVIDIA Inception. Following in order after these are Germany, Russia, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Korea and Japan.

In terms of industries, healthcare, IT services, intelligent video analytics (IVA), media and entertainment (M&E) and robotics are the top five in NVIDIA Inception. AI startups in healthcare account for 16 percent of Inception members, followed by those in IT services at 15 percent. AI startups in IVA make up 8 percent, with M&E and robotics AI startups tied at 7 percent.

Details Spanning 3,000+ Startups Since 2020

More than 3,000 AI startups have joined NVIDIA Inception since 2020. Similar to data across Inception as a whole, AI startups from the U.S. account for the largest segment (27 percent), followed by China (12 percent), and India and the U.K. (tied at 6 percent).

Additionally, startups that have joined since 2020 are concentrated in the same top five industries, though in slightly different order. IT services leads the way at 17 percent, followed by healthcare at 16 percent, M&E at 9 percent, IVA at 8 percent and robotics at 5 percent.

Within the top two industries —  healthcare and IT services — there’s more detail among AI startups who have joined since 2020. The dominant segment within IT services is computer vision at 27 percent, with predictive analytics in second place at 9 percent. The top two segments in healthcare are medical analytics at 38 percent and medical imaging at 36 percent, though the fastest growth is among AI startups in the pharma and AI biology industries at 15 percent.

Virtual and augmented reality startup companies are far outpacing any other segment within M&E, mostly due to the pandemic. These startups are coming to NVIDIA Inception with a shared vision of building an ecosystem for the metaverse.

Disruption Through Startups 

Since Inception’s launch in 2016, it has grown more than tenfold. This growth has accelerated year over year, with membership increasing to 26 percent in 2020, and already reaching 17 percent in the first half of 2021.

NVIDIA Inception is a program built to accommodate and nurture every startup that is accelerating computing, at every stage in their journey. All program benefits are free of charge — there are no fees ever. And unlike other accelerators or incubators, startups never have to give up equity to join.

Startups are the single best lens into the future of modern AI, so join with us today by applying for NVIDIA Inception.

Deathtrap Dungeon: The Golden Room is a gripping choose-your-own-adventure story, but it’s no page-turner.

Based on the best-selling book of the same name, it’s an interactive film in which viewers become the player on their quest to find The Golden Room while facing down dungeon masters and avoiding traps.

NVIDIA RTX technology powers the real-time graphics and virtual sets behind this latest adaptation, which showcases the future of interactive storytelling on a virtual production stage.

On-Set Facilities (OSF) provided the technology for the virtual production. Using its own low-latency computing platform, the GODBOX powered by NVIDIA RTX, OSF enhanced virtual production workflows and delivered real-time compositing and previsualization for the interactive experience.

Bringing Virtual Sets to Life with NVIDIA RTX

When it comes to bringing VFX on set, OSF faced a common challenge — finding computers that could be configured for their creative teams and production needs. So they created their own on-set computer platform, GODBOX Workstations and Servers. It’s a synchronized real-time virtual production platform for low-latency, frame-accurate, virtual production applications and workflows.

From LED and in-camera VFX to mixed reality and motion capture, the GODBOX provides all the tools, features and solutions needed to set up and run a virtual production from any set.

For Deathtrap Dungeon, OSF laid the foundations during preproduction and previsualization. The team used virtual sets and real locations, and combined that with real-time visual effects to bring sets to life. Digitally creating the previsual assets allowed the team to specify the size of stages, amounts of props and how many physical sets were needed.

“The objective was to previsualize the final VFX on the set, so that the directors, actors and crew could all see the virtual world,” said Asa Bailey, director of virtual production at OSF. “The GODBOX delivers in-camera VFX and real-time compositing pipelines powered by NVIDIA RTX. The platform was specifically designed to work with all kinds of virtual productions.”

Throughout the preproduction and the film shoot, OSF used Unreal Engine to conduct virtual scouting sessions using the GODBOX cloud production VPN. Using the secure cloud platform, OSF tested the virtual sets and worked with the production to set lighting and camera movements, all before going on set.

With the RTX-powered GODBOX, OSF also delivered real-time compositing so the cast and crew can see their performance with the virtual set and characters.  The team combined green screen live action with virtual sets and VFX elements in Unreal Engine. Then they’d take the real-time composition and feed it through to large screens and projectors on set.

OSF’s GODBOX stays updated with the latest NVIDIA drivers, as well as recently released optimizations. This helps increase the stability of the machine, which becomes crucial when the cameras are rolling.

Learn more about On-Set Facilities, GODBOX low-latency computing and virtual production. And see other NVIDIA solutions in media and entertainment.

This GFN Thursday shines a spotlight on the latest games joining the collection of over 1,000 titles in the GeForce NOW library from the many publishers that have opted in to stream their games on our open cloud-gaming service.

Members can look forward to 14 games — including Evil Genius 2: World Domination from Rebellion and Escape From Naraka, which features RTX for Founders and Priority members — joining the GeForce NOW library this week. Team17’s Hell Let Loose, already streaming on GeForce NOW, has left early access with the introduction of the Soviet forces on the eastern front.

Getting Rebellious

Ready to take over the world? This GFN Thursday, stream several exciting titles from Rebellion — the award-winning British independent studio. Games include Evil Genius 2: World Domination, Evil Genius, Battlezone: Combat Commander and Zombie Army 4: Dead War.

Be the best bad guy you can be in Evil Genius 2: World Domination (Steam). Construct an evil lair, train your minions to carry out nefarious plans and fight against the Forces of Justice with an array of traps to achieve global domination in this satirical spy-fi lair-builder game.

Members can also look forward to the original Evil Genius coming to the cloud this week, as well as Battlezone: Combat Commander for space-shooting intergalactic battles. And gamers can sink their teeth into Zombie Army 4: Dead War for the fight against the undead Armageddon. With all of these new additions, more gamers now can play these awesome titles from Rebellion.

“GeForce NOW gives us a great opportunity to provide access to our catalog of games to even more gamers,” said Matt Jeffery, chief strategy officer at Rebellion. “NVIDIA makes onboarding games to the cloud a simple process, helping us bring our games to players on low-powered or incompatible devices, with the power of a real gaming rig.”

These newest additions join a host of other Rebellion titles available to stream on GeForce NOW, including Sniper Elite 3, Sniper Elite 4 and Sniper Elite V2 Remastered for players who aim to have a good time with a stealth story. Plus more undead action in the Zombie Army Trilogy and an adventure full of puzzles, traps and mummies in Strange Brigade that’s too good to keep under wraps.

Heating Things Up

The front line is calling. Hell Let Loose (Steam) from Team17 has left early access and is streaming in open access on GeForce NOW.

Charge into battle in this hardcore World War II first-person shooter with epic battles and players filling roles of infantry, tanks, artillery and the dynamically shifting front line. Battle across more than nine maps modeled on real-life locales. Fight in iconic battles from the Western Front, including Carentan, Omaha Beach, Foy and more. Members can experience the chaos of all-out war and stream Hell Let Loose with GeForce NOW this week.

Members can also check out other popular titles from Team17 in the GeForce NOW library, including multiplayer games like Overcooked! and Overcooked! 2 and Golf with Friends for gamers looking to play with friends. Or experience a variety of RPGs with the cozy and creative Hokko Life, the pirate adventure King of the Seas, and the alien world of Planet Alpha.

Up This Week

As always, GFN Thursday means more games. This week, members can journey to a nightmarish temple in Escape from Naraka and save their beloved from an evil demon of legend.

Complete challenges, unlock the secrets of the temple and use unique abilities to confront terrifying enemies and escape the temple. Founders and Priority members can play Escape from Naraka on GeForce NOW with beautifully ray-traced reflections, ray-traced shadows and RTX Global Illumination.

Here’s the complete list of 14 titles coming to the cloud this week:

• Escape from Naraka (day-and-date release on Steam, July 29)
• Starbase (day-and-date release on Steam, July 29)
• Banners of Ruin (day-and-date release on Steam, July 30)
• BUSTAFELLOWS (day-and-date release on Steam, July 30)
• Vesper (day-and-date release on Steam, July 30)
• Alan Wake (Epic Games Store)
• Battlezone: Combat Commander (Steam)
• Evil Genius (Steam)
• Evil Genius 2: World Domination (Steam)
• Lumberjack’s Dynasty (Epic Games Store)
• Moonlighter (Epic Games Store)
• Trials Fusion (Ubisoft Connect)
• X3: Farnham’s Legacy (Steam)
• Zombie Army 4: Dead War (Steam and Epic Games Store)

And while you decide which of these games to spend your weekend with, we have an important question for you.

who’s the most iconic villain in video game history?

— NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) July 28, 2021

Shout it out on Twitter, and we’ll see you next week!

9 Down, 14 letters: Someone skilled in creating and solving crossword puzzles.

This April, the fastest “cruciverbalist” at the ​​American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was Dr.Fill, a crossword puzzle-solving AI program created by Matt Ginsberg.

Dr.Fill perfectly solved the championship puzzle in 49 seconds. The first human champion, Tyler Hinman, filled the 15×15 crossword in exactly three minutes.

Though Ginsberg has published crossword puzzles for the New York Times, he has trouble solving puzzles, even his own. After attending a crossword tournament over a decade ago, Ginsberg decided to create a crossword-solving program to compete against top-tier word nerds.

Ginsberg spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about his decade-long journey creating Dr.Fill and where he envisions it going in the future.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Ginsberg partnered with UC Berkeley’s natural language processing team. By combining their code bases, Dr.Fill outperformed the human competitors at this year’s tournament.
• Dr.Fill performs better on unthemed rather than themed puzzles. This is where the natural language group comes into play, helping Dr.Fill interpret clues and difficult crossword themes.

Tweetables:

“I’m looking forward to the crossword tournament next year because I know we’re going to be working hard to make the program better.” — Matt Ginsberg [11:02]

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Ever see a virtual kitchen materialize in real-time? If you caught NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote for our March 2021 GPU Technology Conference you’re no doubt wondering about more than a few of the presentation’s magic tricks.

With the premiere of “Connecting in the Metaverse: The Making of the GTC Keynote,” Wednesday, Aug. 11, at 11 a.m. Pacific time, NVIDIA team members will reveal the story behind the story told at GTC.

Designed to entertain and inform, GTC keynotes are always filled with cutting-edge demos highlighting NVIDIA’s advancements in supercomputing, deep learning and graphics.

This year, however, with NVIDIA’s team working remotely to create a presentation for attendees flocking to an entirely virtual gathering, those technologies were crucial for making the keynote itself.

The highlight: the reveal of Huang’s virtual kitchen, complete with a digital clone of the man himself.

The half-hour documentary film debuting Wednesday tells the tale of the small team of remote artists who were able to blur the line between real and rendered on a tight deadline with NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for connecting 3D worlds into a shared virtual space.

Go to our SIGGRAPH 2021 landing page to watch the video, and browse all our events at this year’s conference.

Immediately after the video’s debut, those who are registered for SIGGRAPH can join the team at NVIDIA who will dig into the story told in the video for a live Q&A at 11:30 a.m. Pacific time.

To participate in the panel, register for SIGGRAPH using the code “NVIDIA21” for a free basic pass or $25 off an enhanced or ultimate pass.

You’ll be able to find all the details you’ll need to join the panel once they’re posted on SIGGRAPH’s website.

This GFN Thursday brings in hordes of fun — and a whole lot of orcs. Orcs Must Die! 3, the newest title from the action-packed, orc-slaying series from Robot Entertainment, is joining the GeForce NOW library when it releases tomorrow, Friday, July 23.  

In addition, 10 more games are coming to the service this week.

Play Your Games, Your Way

Gaming on GeForce NOW means having instant access to over 1,000 PC games streaming from the cloud. Whether it’s a low-powered PC, Macs, Chromebooks, SHIELD TVs or Android and iOS mobile devices, GeForce NOW supported devices play real PC games with GeForce levels of performance.

And you don’t just get to play real PC versions of games optimized on GeForce NOW compatible devices. The games you play are the ones you own, streaming from popular stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft Connect and GOG.COM. With GeForce NOW, you never have to rebuy a different version of that game to play it on multiple compatible devices.

Members can play awesome PC games, like Orcs Must Die! 3 in high-powered detail and battle across all of their GeForce NOW compatible devices.

Bring the Mayhem

Orcs Must Die! 3 (Steam) challenges players to slice, burn, toss, zap, grind and give it all they’ve got to keep massive hordes of orcs at bay across the battlefield in an effort to secure the castle walls and victory. Battle with a buddy or slay your enemies solo against enormous orc armies with weapons and traps of your choice.

Players can experience all-new war scenarios that pit players against overwhelming legions of orcs. But don’t worry, players have an arsenal of magic, weapons and new War Machines: traps on an oversized scale that range from mega flip traps that launch orcs ragdolling off the castle walls to mega boom barrel launchers that unleash pyrotechnic glory.

Enjoy a new and exciting story set 20 years after the previous game with fresh characters. Play for glory in weekly challenges to see how long you can survive in Endless Mode to put your name on the leaderboard. Then, survive Scramble Mode and face off against evolving orcs with sinister surprises. Finally, take things a step further in the Drastic Steps campaign as the mayhem takes to the skies against flying orcs.

With Orcs Must Die! 3 releasing on Steam and joining the GeForce NOW library, more gamers than ever before can experience the thrill of stomping orcish hordes — regardless of their low-powered rigs.

“We love that our players can experience all of the action and all of the orcs on any GeForce NOW compatible device,” said Patrick Hudson, CEO at developer Robot Entertainment. “It’s great that players who may not have powerful devices can still play the real PC version of our game at orc-slaying power.”

Members can get ready to slay and play Orcs Must Die! 3 on GeForce NOW when it releases tomorrow, July 23.

Game Time

Orcs Must Die! 3 isn’t the only new game this GFN Thursday. Members can look out for these sweet titles ready to stream this week:

• Cris Tales (day-and-date release on Steam and on Epic Games Store, July 20)
• Death’s Door (day-and-date release on Steam, July 20)
• Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector (day-and-date release on Steam and Epic Games Store, July 22)
• Orcs Must Die! 3 (day-and-date release on Steam, July 23)
• Alan Wake’s American Nightmare (Epic Games Store)
• Arcana Heart 3 LOVEMAX SIXSTARS!!!!!! XTEND (Steam)
• Disgaea 2 PC (Steam)
• Edge of Eternity (Epic Games Store)
• Pathfinder: Kingmaker – Enhanced Plus Edition (Epic Games Store)
• Siege Survival: Gloria Victis (Epic Games Store)
• World of Warplanes (Steam)

What games are you playing as we charge into the weekend? Let us know on Twitter or in the comments below.

Walk into a store. Grab your stuff. And walk right out again, without stopping to check out.

In just the past three months, California-based AiFi has helped Choice Market increase sales at one of its Denver stores by 20 percent among customers who opted to skip the checkout line.

It allowed Żabka, a Polish convenience store chain, to provide faster checkout for morning train commuters.

It helped pro-racing team Penske and Verizon run a dinky 200-square-foot store at the Indy500, so race fans could quickly get back to the action.

And on Wednesday AiFi announced an expanded partnership with Loop Neighborhood to introduce its computer vision, camera-only platform into stores in California, starting with two Bay Area locations.

AiFi, a member of the NVIDIA Inception accelerator for AI and deep learning startups, has moved out of the proof-of-concept stage and into stores across the world.

Its technology makes shopping more convenient and helps retailers better understand their customers.

“Retailers can now get as much information about physical shopping habits as online stores are getting from ecommerce,” said AiFi CEO and co-founder Steve Gu, a veteran of Apple and Google.

AiFi’s ability to analyze shopper habits is even more impressive because its stores don’t need to buy costly sensors and RFID tags.

Instead, the company uses real-time image recognition and edge AI powered by NVIDIA GPUs to recognize the items shoppers select and charge them, usually through an app linked to the customer’s credit card.

It’s not an easy task in busy stores stocked with many hundreds of items, but the five-year-old company’s technology now achieves an accuracy rate of 99 percent.

To date, more than 15 stores worldwide are putting the company’s technology to work. Those stores are already serving satisfied customers who return again and again.

At Choice Market, 60 percent of shoppers who tried the checkout-free option used it again within a month. Twenty percent came back three times.

The computer-vision-powered system uses NVIDIA Metropolis for smart video analytics. It works smoothly alongside the store’s traditional checkout system, and is integrated with the Choice Now app, where customers can shop checkout-free, and place online orders and arrange pickups.

AiFi is revolutionizing retail operations with AI. At the Indy500 auto race earlier this year, Penske Entertainment’s nano-store allowed fans to buy snacks, beverages and merchandise with an app. No need to stop and swipe a credit card.

This speed translates well to any kind of store where people need to slip in and out in a hurry. Żabka partnered with AiFi to open its first public autonomous store in Poznan, Poland, quickly drawing huge amounts of foot traffic from commuters going to and from a nearby train station.

With AiFi integrated with the Żappka App, which has over 5 million users, harried commuters could hustle out the door with a newspaper and a morning coffee.

More stores equipped with AiFi’s technology are coming. In France, the company is working with Carrefour on what the retailer calls its “Flash LabStore,” a frictionless store at its headquarters in Massy.

And in the UK, Britain’s fourth-largest supermarket, Morrisons, is working with AiFi to test out a store with no checkout.

These stores represent a growing number of collaborations with major retailers that see AiFi’s combination of AI and computer vision as the key to a brick and mortar retail renaissance that will ultimately put more goods in front of more customers, in more places.

Learn more about NVIDIA’s AI platform powering intelligent retail stores.