Nvidia CTO on Virtual Worlds: Metaverse, Data Centers, Cryptocurrencies

Human imagination is unlimited, and people have never stopped imagining the virtual world for many years. Whether it is the virtual network world in "The Matrix", or the dream world woven with superpowers in "Inception", or the oasis space in "Ready Player One", human beings have always been eager to enter the virtual world, so " The concept of "metaverse" is sweeping the world, but what exactly is a virtual world? how is it How to achieve? What is its relation to reality? These problems are bothering everyone, so the overseas media ZDNet invited Michael Kagan, the chief technology officer of Nvidia, to try to explain the concept through experts and distinguish fact from fiction.

Metaverse is a virtual world, a world where you can make your fairy tales come true, and Nvidia's Omniverse is a platform to help everyone realize this idea.

You can create a virtual world in Omniverse, you can live in the virtual world, you can collaborate in the global virtual world, there are no geographical and language boundaries, and there are no other restrictions, you can connect this virtual world with the real world, You can make your fantasies come true, and all of the above are part of the metaverse.

But what we are currently doing is obviously creating a virtual world. The biggest difference between the virtual world and the metaverse is that the former does not need to correspond one-to-one with the real world, while the metaverse needs to correspond one-to-one with our real world. One of NVIDIA's current projects is to simulate the earth, which can simulate the real world well, or simulate what will happen in the future? For example, how do we deal with global warming, how do we deal with climate change?

In fact, in addition to the metaverse, the virtual world also includes the aforementioned simulated earth, which has another name called digital twin, and you can also simulate it before building large-scale projects. You've probably heard that big automakers like BMW are working with us where they simulate big projects before they build them and once the business builds something you have a digital twin of the project whether it's data A center, a manufacturing plant, or a smart city. You can interact with the digital twin and train your robot in the virtual world to become a better robot in the real world.

Creating a digital twin in the virtual world requires an AI model to help it make decisions and respond to what is happening, and cloud computing and data centers are inseparable behind this. It can be said that the data center is a dark line in the virtual world.

Michael Kagan pointed out that the construction of virtual worlds requires a huge infrastructure to transform and develop the technology, including higher processing power, 3D graphics, virtual reality technology, Internet connectivity and other functions. To achieve this, it is unrealistic to rely on ordinary computer equipment to run the huge code of the Metaverse, and cloud computing is a good solution.

For example, SimEarth uploads the program that needs to be calculated to the cloud, then undergoes powerful data processing, and finally transmits it back to the client. More powerful data centers mean faster processing power, which will greatly improve the smoothness and latency of the simulated earth.

If you want to connect to the virtual world, you need to enter parameters, which are far more complicated than the commands generated by keyboard input. Sensor devices collect user input parameters, upload them to the cloud, and convert them into parameters that the digital twin can understand, allowing a person in the virtual world to move or issue commands.

Once the instructions have been communicated, it’s time for the modeling part of the digital twin. All objects, buildings, etc. in the virtual world are virtualized. Nvidia once interspersed a few seconds of "fake" Jensen Huang and his background during its online GTC conference, which required more than three dozen workers to use RTX ray tracing technology to scan Jensen Huang and take thousands of photos of Jensen Huang and the kitchen from different angles. The "kitchen" is modeled in Omniverse, a virtual collaboration platform developed by Nvidia, and finally combined with artificial intelligence to achieve the effect of being fake. For these, you need more powerful cloud computing technology and many powerful data centers to support powerful simulation capabilities. .

Cryptocurrency is a transaction medium that uses the principles of cryptography to ensure transaction security and control the creation of transaction units. It is a type of digital currency (or virtual currency). It is based on a set of open source codes of computer calculations around the world, generated through computer graphics cards and CPUs, and a large number of calculations, and uses cryptography to ensure the security of all aspects of currency circulation. Cryptography-based design allows cryptocurrency to be transferred or paid only by real owners.

There are four major characteristics of cryptocurrencies, one is international recognition, cryptocurrencies are not bound by interest rates, exchange rates, transaction fees or any other fees, so you can transfer money on an international level without any problems. Also, there is no electronic cash system, which means your account is not owned by anyone else. With this system, you have private keys and corresponding public keys that make up a cryptocurrency address.

Second, transaction costs are low. With cryptocurrency transactions, there are usually no transaction fees. Miners receive compensation from the cryptocurrency network for doing number crunching to produce bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. However, if you use a third-party management service to maintain your own cryptocurrency wallet, some external fees may be charged; third, the transaction is kept confidential. Using cryptocurrency for online transactions, it will be the only transaction channel between the two parties. Messages are traded via "push," where you decide what to send to your recipients, which is a great way to protect yourself from identity theft or account threats.

Finally, peer-to-peer transactions. This is one of the main assets of cryptocurrency payments with no middlemen or third parties involved. The technology is designed to facilitate reasonable, instant and secure settlements without the involvement of anyone, including banks or any other financial system. In addition, the global network uses blockchain technology to manage the databases that record transactions, which means that Bitcoin is not operated by any one central authority, but by its network. Therefore, based on the above characteristics, people have made a strong binding between cryptocurrency and the virtual world, but is it true that the virtual world cannot survive without cryptocurrency?

Although Michael Kagan did not deny the important position of cryptocurrency in the virtual world, he believes that the current task of the virtual world is to do a good job in infrastructure construction. The world isn't getting any better.

Produced | Technology Wisdom Valley