Nvidia wants people to interact with avatars

The American company that specializes in designing graphics chips for computers and video game consoles, has launched Omniverse Avatar, an interactive avatar generation platform using artificial intelligence.

Virtual avatars to help us when ordering at fast food restaurants or to make an appointment. This is the goal that Nvidia pursues with Omniverse Avatar launching on November 9. It combines several technologies, such as speech recognition, recommendation engines, or 3D animation, based on artificial intelligence (AI) to create avatars that humans can interact with. Presented on the occasion of Nvidia GTC Conference 2021.

During the latter, CEO Jensen Huang participated in several demonstrations. Someone highlights Tokkio, a “talking booth” It is located in the ordering station of a fast food restaurant. He interacts with two clients and recommends them products based on their requests. The “small mobile robot” Particularly able to maintain eye contact and respond to each other’s facial expressions thanks to face tracking technology.

Openness to creating intelligent assistants

Another featured a realistic animated avatar of a person in a noisy café being shown to him during a video conference. This allowed her to be heard without any background noise. This example is based on Nvidia’s Maxine ProjectAnd “Designed to enhance the way we collaborate in this entirely new world of our Internet”. Its goal is to improve the quality of video conferencing using AI-based features such as real-time translation and transcription.

For Nvidia, the Omniverse Avatar platform opens the door to creating AI assistants capable of assisting in daily interactions with customers, such as when it comes to ordering at a restaurant, making a bank transaction or making a personal reservation. “The dawn of intelligent virtual assistants has arrived.”, its CEO Jensen Huang said.

The platform is part of the company’s Omniverse programme. It provides creators and designers with a shared virtual world in which they can collaborate using tools, resources, and projects. Nvidia’s CEO says it has the technology to create new 3D virtual worlds where it will be possible to buy and own homes, arts and even cars. He believes that they will be greater than the physical world. “Content creators in virtual worlds will accomplish more than they do in the physical world. We built the Omniverse for the builders of these virtual worlds”He explained that most of it will be built by scientists, innovators and companies. A concept reminiscent of the metaverse, an area in which many companies, such as Meta and Microsoft, are involved.