NVIDIA GTC 2021 announcements, Omniverse VR and more

NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference, or GTC, is currently underway, and during the event, the company shared more information about Omniverse, its virtual world simulation and collaboration tool. NVIDIA today announced Omniverse VR and other Omniverse-related news alongside the November release of the NVIDIA Studio Driver, following the announcement and demonstration of Omniverse Avatar earlier this week.

NVIDIA announced Omniverse VR, the first "full-image, real-time ray-traced VR environment," as the first piece of Omniverse news. Creators will be able to collaborate on 3D scenes in the same virtual world in this VR space. This feature will be available soon, but NVIDIA has not specified which platforms will be supported.

Nvidia unveiled Omniverse Avatar, a new platform for creating interactive AI avatars, on Tuesday. The platform combines Nvidia's speech AI, computer vision, natural language understanding, and simulation technologies.

Digital avatars created with the platform, according to Nvidia, can see, speak, and converse on a variety of topics and are interactive with ray-traced 3D graphics. The platform paves the way for the development of virtual assistants that can be used in almost any industry. The technology, according to Nvidia, could help with a wide range of customer service interactions, including restaurant orders, appointment and reservation scheduling, banking transactions, and so on.

Omniverse is now available to anyone in Open Beta and has over 70,000 users. OmniVerse is used by companies such as BMW, Adobe, South Park, Bently, Ericsson, and Epigraph.

Omniverse Remote is another new tool that allows users to view ray-traced assets on their phones by connecting to Omniverse apps using Android and iOS devices. Face, hand, and body tracking are also possible with smartphones. Also available to Omniverse Open Beta participants is Omniverse Showroom, a new app. This allows users to play around with the physics and rendering technologies of Omniverse without having to have any technical knowledge of the platform.

New Omniverse Connectors, which connect with other creative apps to help compose scenes and visualise them in real-time, were also announced by NVIDIA. Reallusion iClone, Replica Studios, RAdDiCAL, and other apps are among the new connectors. There will be more in the future, including an Adobe Substance 3D Material Plugin, a Maxon Cinema4D connector, and more.

NVIDIA also announced that Omniverse Enterprise is now generally available, rounding out the Omniverse news at GTC. Connectors for Autodesk 3ds Max, Maya, Revit, SketchUp, and Unreal Engine are included in the launch, allowing organisations to get started creating scenes of any scale.

Logitech is integrating NVIDIA Broadcast technology into its G Hub app, which was also announced at GTC but isn't exactly new today. This essentially means that noise cancellation features are now available without the need for additional software on Logitech's G Hub headsets and microphones.

Lastly, there's the November NVIDIA Studio Driver, which includes enhancements for a number of creative apps, as well as improved performance for man workflows. NVIDIA Texture Tools 3 is a new API that allows you to compress textures on the GPU much faster than you could on the CPU alone. 

Twinmotion 2022.11 enabled ray-tracing acceleration with NVIDIA's RT cores, resulting in significantly faster renders, especially on newer RTX GPUs. NVIDIA's RTX 30 series GPUs now render OctaneRender 2021.1 motion blur renders faster; V-Ray 5 Update 2 includes new features such as Decal and Sharpen/Blur layers that are accelerated by RTX GPUs, as well as support for GPU caching in Light caching. Houdini 19 features a new render engine that takes advantage of both the CPU and GPU.

NVIDIA announced that customers who purchase NVIDIA Studio laptops will receive three months of Adobe Creative Cloud for free starting November 12th in the Americas and November 16th in Europe and Asia. Adobe Creative Cloud costs $79.49 per month on a monthly basis ($52.99 per month on an annual basis) and includes Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Illustrator. This isn't the first time this deal has come up, but it's a nice bonus if you're in the market for a new workstation.