How Nvidia is (Still) Paving the Way for the Metaverse
And what their CEO thinks is necessary for the Metaverse to be possible.
Nvidia, a less familiar tech giant to most, has had its stock sore so far, reaching a trillion-dollar valuation earlier this year. While most of that growth is due to the company’s investment in AI and GPUs, its CEO, Jensen Huang, still believes in the Metaverse and has publicly discussed it at several conferences.
Huang’s main prediction has been that the Metaverse would be more expansive, as the virtual New York might be twice the size of the physical New York and that it would have a larger economy than the physical world.
Huang has been building towards exactly this with the Omniverse platform, a metaverse for engineers and designers that helps users build industrial metaverse applications. Already the platform has been a pioneer for digital twins, 3D standards, and interoperability.
They’ve also launched partnerships with Adobe and Blender to add capabilities for editing materials and allow artists to work across Blender and Omniverse via USD (more on what this is in a second), respectively.
However, for the Metaverse to become all that it can be, Huang believed there were four requirements for software engines like the Omniverse: they must be able to render high-fidelity images, create worlds, avatars, content, etc. that obey the law of physics, be scalable and in the cloud, and be completely open.
As one might expect, the Omniverse platform is attempting to meet many of these and has already met some of these requirements (ie. it’s completely open). In addition to this though, Nvidia and others (including Pixar, Adobe, and Apple) formed The Alliance for Open USD, an organization that aims to collectively grow USD and make it a common standard for 3D content. For context, USD is a framework and ecosystem developed by Pixar that can describe, compose, and simulate within 3D worlds. Huang has said that USD is to the Metaverse what HTML is to the web. The end goal of the Alliance is to ultimately create an open and interoperable metaverse.
Nvidia has been involved in the Metaverse in other ways, such as building digital twins to figure out optimal lighting for the Voyager, a building part of Nvidia’s headquarters, and creating chips like the H100 GPU which have recently soared in sales.
As expert Matthew Ball notes, Nvidia may not own games or have branded headsets, but they can power the Metaverse.
