Category: Project Holodeck

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Ready Player One Gets the NVIDIA Holodeck Treatment at GTC 2018

Today marks the start of NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2018 event in San Jose, California, with the technology manufacturer ready to start four days of talks and sessions focused on virtual reality (VR), AI, graphics cards and a whole lot more. To get the ball rolling, and with Ready Player One due to launch this week, NVIDIA is treating attendees to a VR experience on the company’s Holodeck.

Ready Player One Hero

Teaming up with Warner Bros. and HTC Vive, NVIDIA Holodeck will use 3D assets from Ready Player One, helping transport players to the year 2045 and “Aech’s basement,” where, in an escape room-style experience, they join a quest in which solving one puzzle triggers the next. Teams will have to work together to complete the challenge within the allotted time to win.

“Combining physics with natural interactions, NVIDIA Holodeck creates a virtual world that looks and feels real to players, who can interact with virtual objects while exploring richly detailed scenes. It imports complex, detailed models consisting of tens of millions of polygons in real-time VR, making it the perfect environment to showcase the cinema-quality assets of Ready Player One,” states NVIDIA.

Holodeck was first unveiled during last years keynote address by founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. Designed as a VR collaboration platform that brings people together from around the world in ultra-realistic virtual experiences, Holodeck  has previously been demonstrated by Swedish supercar maker Christian Koenigsegg.

Then in October 2017 NVIDIA launched the application process for product designers, application developers, architects or any other type of 3D content creator to sign up for early access.

GTC 2018 is likely to feature much more of Holodeck as the week progresses, with NVIDIA having previously mentioned plans to address deep learning techniques in virtual environments, including capabilities for AI-based training, simulation and content creation using the platform. VRFocus will be at GTC 2018 to bring you all the latest news and announcements as they happen.

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Training AI & Robots in VR with NVIDIA’s Project Holodeck

At SIGGRAPH 2017, NVIDIA was showing off their Isaac Robot that had been trained to play dominos within a virtual world environment of NVIDIA’s Project Holodeck. They’re using Unreal Engine to simulate interactions with people in VR to train a robot how to play dominos. They can use a unified code base of AI algorithms for deep reinforcement learning within VR, and then apply that same code base to drive a physical Baxter robot. This creates a safe context to train and debug the behavior of the robot within a virtual environment, but to also experiment with cultivating interactions with the robot that are friendly, exciting, and entertaining. This will allow humans to build trust in interacting with robots in a virtual environment so that they are more comfortable and familiar with interacting with physical robots in the real world.

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I talked with NVIDIA’s senior VR designer on this project, Omer Shapira, at the SIGGRAPH conference in August, where we talk about using Unreal Engine and Project Holodeck to train AI, using a variety of AI frameworks that can use VR as a reality simulator, stress testing for edge cases and anomalous behaviors in a safe environment, and how they’re cultivating social awareness and robot behaviors that improve human-computer interactions.

Here’s NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang talking about using VR to train robots & AI:

If you’re interested in learning more about AI, then be sure to check out the Voices of AI podcast which just released the first five episodes.

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The post Training AI & Robots in VR with NVIDIA’s Project Holodeck appeared first on Road to VR.

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Nvidia Aiming to Bring Star Trek’s Holodeck to Life

The Holy Grail of immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences for almost all technology geeks is, of course, the Holodeck from Star Trek. Ever since commercial VR become a reality, that has been the ideal for many. Though the realisation of that goal may still be some distance away, Nvidia are taking the first steps in that direction with Project Holodeck.

During the keynote presentation by Jensen Huang, a demonstration was shown featuring what has been accomplished so far with Nvidia’s Holodeck. The demonstration featured Swedish supercar maker Christian Koenigsegg and some of his staff, who appeared against a green line grid as futuristic robot-like figures before the scene transformed into a white space, and the latest Koenigsegg hypercar appeared.

The car was rendered in real time, with no post-processing as realistic 3D VR. One member of staff climbs into the car, her avatar able to reach out and grab the steering wheel as though it were a real object. The car itself is a hybrid that has no gears and uses a direct drive system instead of traditional gearing to reach an impressive top speed of 250 mph.

Huang asks if he can see all the different parts of the car, pointing out that the car is not just a shell; it uses the full set of blueprints to render even the smallest nut and bolt in full detail. To demonstrate this fact, the car promptly disassembled itself into many thousands of individual car parts, all neatly laid out against the white background. Just as quickly, it reassembled itself back into the $1.9 million (USD) hybrid hypercar, rendered in almost flawless detail.

The Holodeck application is designed to be used to enable collaboration between parties who may be in disparate parts of the world who can, in real time, interact with realistic, physics-based models. Early access for the product is expected in September of 2017.

VRFocus will bring you further news on Project Holodeck and other Nvidia VR projects when it becomes available.