The fact that NVIDIA has become famous thanks to its graphics cards and the video games that are enjoyed with them is almost a coincidence. At least that’s what its CEO, Jensen Huang, believes. In a recent interview, he said that this was only his first killer app and that in reality, his big project for the future is quite different.
Huang seems particularly enthusiastic about the idea of creating a metaverse (which NVIDIA calls Omniverse). It will generate a virtual replica of our world that will merge with it and allow us to use it as a kind of test environment for the real world: before doing anything in our world, it would be better to try to simulate this experiment in the virtual world and, if it works, the improvement can be applied in the real world without fear of making mistakes.
The idea already has a first practical proposal. NVIDIA has teamed up with BMW to create a replica of its factory in Regensburg, Germany. It will be in this replica that BMW – which has already begun working with NVIDIA in this area – will experiment with new workflows, which, if they work there, will be applied to its physical factory.
For Huang, the metaverse “will be where we will create the future,” but it will also be a digital world “thousands of times bigger than the physical world. There will be a new New York or a new Shanghai. Every factory and every building will have a digital twin that will constantly stimulate and replicate the physical version of it”.
Huang added, engineers and programmers will be able to simulate how new software developments that end up in the physical version of the car, robot, airport or building behave. “All the software that will end up running on those physical objects will first be simulated on their digital twins, and will then be downloaded into the physical version. As a result, the product is getting better at an exponential rate.”
The idea is not only to use that metaverse as a test environment for our world. In addition to that Huang made it clear that both worlds would merge thanks to virtual reality and augmented reality:
For him it will be possible to exit and enter both worlds: “you will go to the virtual world through virtual reality, and objects from the virtual world will be displayed in the physical world through augmented reality.”
