Netscape didn’t make HTML or the internet, but the company did make the internet possible. Tim Berners-Lee made HTML, and Netscape helped it become a technology that changed the whole world.
Last week, Nvidia’s opening presentation at Siggraph compared the Universal Scene Description (USD), which was made by Disney’s Pixar, to HTML of the metaverse. This is like putting Pixar where Berners-Lee was and Nvidia where Netscape was, but unlike Netscape, Nvidia is very well run and knows which battles to pick because Steve Jobs made it possible.
Nvidia also talked about the future of the metaverse, where avatars would look like browsers and offer a new way for people and machines to interact. Also, Nvidia came up with the idea of neural graphics, which mostly uses AI to make more realistic metaverse images with a lot less work.
Let’s talk more about what happened at Siggraph this week and how Nvidia and Disney can and should show off their strengths at the front of the metaverse. This week, my product of the week is the third version of the HP Halo Dragonfly laptop, which just came out. Halo products show off the seller’s ability to bring in customers, and this one can compete with Apple’s best.
the Disney Virtual World
I used to work for Disney, and I can’t think of any other multimedia company that would be a better starting point for building the metaverse.
Disney’s main goals have always been to be creative and try to make magic seem real. Even though the company has had trouble keeping its innovative edge over the years, it still beats all of its competitors in terms of the magical places you can visit and the movies that are popular with people of all ages, but especially with kids.
It’s interesting that Disney also owns the Marvel Universe, which shows the idea of the multiverse, which could easily become a metaverse concept. This means that as the metaverse becomes more popular with consumers, Disney may become even more important as a leader of this new entertainment technology.
This is a roundabout way of saying that, given its ties to USD and entertainment, Disney may be the best media company to take advantage of this new paradigm and turn its view of the metaverse into something truly amazing. Think about making metaverse Disney parks that kids can visit from the comfort of their own homes, even when there are natural disasters, pandemics, or wars.
One Movement in the Metaverse by Nvidia
At the moment, the metaverse is a little bit of a mess. Companies like Google and Meta seem to be making experiences that aren’t what the market wants. This is similar to what CompuServe and AOL did at the start of the internet. These walled-garden projects didn’t work because no single company could meet all of the users’ needs. After the open internet came along, AOL and CompuServe mostly went away. This is when technology really took off.
The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, is a firm believer in the metaverse. He calls it Web 3.0, which is the next step after Web 2.0. (the internet we know today, with the shift to the cloud and user-generated content). This idea of a single metaverse with easy-to-access parts needs a lot of standardization and improvements to physical interfaces like VR glasses.
Huang talked at the speech about the big improvements in headset technology that would make VR glasses much closer to the size and weight of reading glasses. This would make them less tiring and annoying. But keeping in mind the problems we had with 3D glasses, if the industry wants to reach its full potential, it will still have to work hard to get customers to accept prosthetic interfaces.
One of the most interesting parts of the presentation was the idea of neural graphics, which are graphics that have been greatly improved by AI. These graphics can find things in the real world and make mirror images of them in the virtual world faster and for less money. Nvidia presented almost 16 papers on neural graphics at the conference, and two of them won prizes.
Huang talked about how these virtual elements would be linked through AI to make sure they stayed in sync with the real world. This would allow for complex digital twins that could be used for highly accurate simulations in business and entertainment.
uang talked about how these virtual elements would be linked through AI to make sure they stayed in sync with the real world. This would allow for complex digital twins that could be used for highly accurate simulations in business and entertainment.
when Huang, whose avatar kept showing up during the keynote, would actually give the speech. Huang said that improvements in the realism and emotions of avatars will eventually make them much better than humans at giving presentations like these.
WHuang talked about a new idea he called “Audio2Face.” It links a recording of sound to an avatar that can make realistic facial expressions, show how it feels, and often look like a real person.
To get this level of realism, they mapped out the facial muscles and taught the AI how people use those muscles to show different emotions. They were then able to change how the face looked after the fact. Without a doubt, today’s youth will enjoy this way too much and cause us to have to deal with some deepfake problems in the future.
By combining Audio2Face with MDL, a new language for describing materials, and Neural VDB, which can cut video file sizes by up to 99%, a pattern with better resolution and more realism can be made at a much lower cost.
Back to Disney, this technology would allow the company to make more interesting streaming and cinema content while spending less on production, which would be great for its top and bottom lines.
Huang talked about Omniverse ACE, a cloud publishing service for avatars, as a way to wrap up. This could make a market for making avatars, which could be a very profitable new area of technology on its own.
A Bottom Line
Disney is in a unique position to make money from our move to the metaverse, thanks to USD and its big advantages in making content for people of different ages.
Nvidia, on the other hand, is the tech company to keep an eye on in this area. It is at the forefront of building the Web 3.0 metaverse, which will eventually replace the internet as we know it and give us amazing new experiences as well as problems we haven’t even thought of yet.
Both Nvidia and Disney are giants in their own fields, and it hasn’t been a good idea to bet against them. Together, they are making a metaverse that will amaze people, make them laugh, and help solve problems like climate change.
Some of the things that are being made for the metaverse are very interesting. Here’s an example of something else:
We are at the start of yet another big change in technology. Once it’s done, the world will be a mix of the real and the virtual, and it will change again for good.
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