Nvidia Meta-Verse

Source: VentureBeat, Aug 2021

Nvidia’s Omniverse, billed as a “metaverse for engineers,” has grown to more than 50,000 users. But Nvidia now hopes to dramatically expand this base with the addition of millions of Blender users who use a simple tool to create 3D imagery.

At the online Siggraph visual computing event, Nvidia announced it is launching a major expansion of the Omniverse, the simulation and collaboration platform delivering the foundation of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

“In reality, the metaverse has been around. It just hasn’t been very well connected. But the metaverse describes virtual worlds. And much the same way the universe describes the planets that are in the universe, there will be more and more content in these virtual worlds. There will be exchanges, market economics, and other things in the virtual world, and Omniverse is designed to be the connector of these worlds.”

Blender is a leading open source 3D animation tool, and it will now have Universal Scene Description (USD) support, enabling artists to access Omniverse production pipelines. Pixar created USD for its films to enable users to combine digital tools to create and share 3D imagery.

He said Omniverse makes it possible for designers, artists, and reviewers to work together in real time across leading software applications in a shared virtual world from anywhere. Kerris said Nvidia is taking input from developers, partners, and customers and is advancing the platform so everyone from individuals to large enterprises can work with others to build amazing virtual worlds that look, feel, and behave just as the physical world does.

Nvidia defines the metaverse as an immersive and connected shared virtual world. Here, artists can create one-of-a-kind digital scenes,  architects can create beautiful buildings, and engineers can design new products for homes. These creations — often called digital twins — can then be taken into the physical world after they have been perfected in the digital world.

Apple, Pixar, and Nvidia collaborated to bring advanced physics capabilities to USD, embracing open standards to provide 3D workflows to billions of devices.

“We came together working with Apple and collectively put out a whitepaper that defined physics across the platforms”

Web Architecture 101

Source: Medium,
<read source article for details>

Key Terms:

DNS, Load Balancer, Web application servers, database servers, caching service, job queue & servers, full text search services, data, cloud storage, content delivery network

What’s Next in Computing

Source: Chris Dixon blog, Feb 2016

We are now entering an era in which processors and sensors are getting so small and cheap that there will be many more computers than there are people.

A lot of the excitement in AI has focused on deep learning, a machine learning technique that was popularized by a now famous 2012 Google project that used a giant cluster of computers to learn to identify cats in YouTube videos. Deep learning is a descendent of neural networks, a technology that dates back to the 1940s. It was brought back to life by a combination of factors, including new algorithms, cheap parallel computation, and the widespread availability of large data sets.

AI systems get better as more data is collected, which means it’s possible to create a virtuous flywheel of data network effects (more users → more data → better products → more users). The mapping startup Waze useddata network effects to produce better maps than its vastly better capitalized competitors. Successful AI startups will follow a similar strategy.

Ada Lovelace – the 1st Programmer

Source: The New Yorker, Oct 2013

On January 5, 1841, she asked, “What is Imagination?” Two things, she thought. First, “the combining faculty,” which “seizes points in common, between subjects having no apparent connection,” and then, she wrote, “Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”

 Related Resource: PsychCentral, Oct 2014

“Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things… Imagination too shows what is … Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!”

… believed that intuition and imagination were critical to effectively applying mathematical and scientific concepts.

 

Software Development Cost Comparison

Source: TechCrunch, Apr 2015

The best app developers in the U.S. charge $250 per hour while the best in Indonesia charge about $20 per hour. That’s 12.5x difference in how app developers price their services. Of course, there is purchase-power parity and a host of other reasons, such as time zone, language, product culture and exposure that account for some of the difference.