Nvidia’s Chief Executive Officer, Jensen Huang revealed the company’s plans on creating a ‘metaverse’, artificially created environments where companies can simulate the future before acting on it.
In an interview with Time magazine, Huang said the company wanted to “create the future” by creating a virtual world thousands of times larger than the physical world. That amount of digital space would serve to recreate New York City and Shanghai, with “digital twins” of “every single factory and every single building”.
“Engineers and software programmers could simulate new software that will ultimately run in the physical version of the car, the physical version of the robot, the physical version of the airport, the physical version of the building”, said Huang.
“All of the software that’s going to be running in these physical things will be simulated in the digital twin first, and then it will be downloaded into the physical version”.
According to Huang’s predictions, people will be able to go in and out of the two worlds through so-called “wormholes”, however, he did not specify how the process would look like.
“We’ll go into the virtual world using virtual reality, and the objects in the virtual world, in the digital world, will come into the physical world, using augmented reality. So what’s going to happen is pieces of the digital world will be temporarily, or even semi-permanently, augmenting our physical world. It’s ultimately about the fusion of the virtual world and the physical world”, said Huang.
Nvidia is already using its Omniverse 3D modelling software to remake factories and machinery in a virtual world. Similar to a large-scale video game, the software provides 3D objects, people and real-world physics using its physical simulator PhysX.
The latest developments in AI and machine learning give the software the capability to simulate actions and find the most efficient process over time. This will come in handy for large manufacturers looking to automate their business even further.
Huang continues: “AI is a watershed moment for the world. Humans’ fundamental technology is intelligence. We’re in the process of automating intelligence so that we can augment ours.
“The thing that’s really cool is that AI is software that writes itself, and it writes software that no humans can. It’s incredibly complex. And we can automate intelligence to operate at the speed of light, and because of computers, we can automate intelligence and scale it out globally instantaneously.”
