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Nvidia Inception is a free program designed to help startups evolve faster through access to technology, discounts and experts. At the Nvidia GTC Conference, several digital twins startups explained how the program combined with the Omniverse platform accelerated their product and marketing development.
The core of Nvidia’s Inception program provides appropriate technical expertise within Nvidia, preferred pricing and access to cloud credits, introductions to venture capital firms, and marketing support. Of note at GTC were the varied ways companies were translating digital twins into new business models.
Blackshark is creating a high-fidelity replica of the earth for gaming and enterprise customers. Rios.AI uses digital twins to improve the design and programmability of a robots-as-a-service offering. Radical is developing tools to translate consumer-grade video into 3D digital twins of people.
Blackhawk goes global with digital twin
Blackshark started as a gaming studio in Austria and partnered with Microsoft to build the 3D world used in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. They raised $20 million a year later and became an Inception partner. The company has developed an AI pipeline for analyzing fresh satellite and drone footage to generate an updated digital twin of the whole planet in about 72-hours.
A key innovation is a patented data-labeling process that helps identify over 1.4 billion unique structures from the imagery and align these to the final 3D digital twin. This innovation has accelerated the labeling process by 10-100 times, depending on the type of data.
Gastao De Figueiredo, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Blackshark, said the Inception team had done a fantastic job building the community of potential customers. This week, he got an email from another Omniverse customer hoping to improve real-world simulations for drone deployments. The Omniverse platform also helps reduce the friction with new customers thanks to the ecosystem of USD plugins.
Rios.AI uses digital twins to collaborate with customers
Rios.AI accelerates robot deployments for common use cases like packing boxes and helps align funding with use rather than a capital expense. Rios uses digital twins to collaborate with customers on implementation and streamline programming and tests.
Clinton Smith, cofounder & CTO at Rios.ai, said the initial value of the Inception program was the discounts. The company deploys GPUs into each robot platform to keep latency down, leading to significant hardware costs. They also take advantage of cloud credits to cut down their training costs.
Radical has developed a scalable human motion tracking platform that can convert 2D video into 3D animations of the movement. Its latest implementation can map live video feeds from multiple participants into a shared metaverse in near real-time.
Radical CEO Gavan Gravesen said they are always investigating options for optimizing the performance of their algorithms to improve user experience and reduce the cost of cloud processing. He said the technical support they received as part of the Inception program was fantastic and helped them quickly get their new service into production.
Omniverse also helped Radical improve the versatility of its service across larger content studios, broadcasters, small teams, and prosumer enthusiasts. Moving 3D geometry across different tools has been an age-old challenge for 3D applications. “Omniverse is a powerful platform to provide seamless acceleration and eventually democratization of the 3D content creation process,” Gravesen said.
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