What better way to look back at NVIDIA’s top five videos of 2021 than to hop into the cockpit of a virtual plane flying over Taipei.
That was how NVIDIA’s Jeff Fisher and Manuvir Das invited viewers into their COMPUTEX keynote on May 31. Their aircraft sailed over the city’s green hills and banked around its tallest skyscraper, Taipei 101, on the wings of Microsoft Flight Sim running on an NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU.
It was a fitting start to one of the world’s largest annual tech gatherings, and one of the many virtual events in the second year of the COVID pandemic.
GeForce RTX and AI at COMPUTEX
In the keynote (below), Fisher unveiled our latest flagship gaming GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and the latest games it brings to life with features like ray tracing.
Das revealed new ways to access enterprise AI through subscriptions to NVIDIA Base Command in the cloud and the growing lineup of NVIDIA Certified Systems, many of which are available from partners based in Taiwan.
Omniverse Enterprise and Research at SIGGRAPH
A history of computer graphics packed into less than two minutes of video narrated by Alvy Ray Smith, the computer scientist who co-founded Pixar and helped pioneer animated movies, introduced an Aug. 10 special address at SIGGRAPH.
Richard Kerris, vice president of Omniverse platform development, launched NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, an environment where companies from Adobe to Zoom can create virtual worlds and digital twins.
Sanja Fidler, senior director of AI research at NVIDIA, walked viewers through a grab bag of research projects including software to create your personal avatar in real time.
Making of a Kitchen Keynote
In his SIGGRAPH talk, Kerris showed a clip giving a behind-the-scenes look at how NVIDIA used Omniverse to make CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote in April.
The full 30+ minute mini-documentary (below) debuted at SIGGRAPH and was one of our most popular outtakes from 2021, viewed nearly 1.5 million times. It’s the story of how 34 artists, 15 researchers and 21 Jensens made magic in Omniverse.
A Three-Chip Company
The content of that GTC keynote included a fair amount of its own tech fireworks.
In declaring NVIDIA a “three-chip company,” Huang announced the NVIDIA Grace CPU, for building what he called “giant scale-out” AI and high performance computing systems; the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU for networking; and NVIDIA DRIVE Atlan for autonomous vehicles.
With those headliners, as well as new software stacks for conversational AI, recommender systems, networking, security and more, it’s no wonder the talk (below) was viewed more than 2.2 million times.
Digital Twins and Avatars
In retrospect, it was a year of digital twins and virtual worlds. So, it was fitting that one of our most memorable moments was the debut of Toy Jensen, a character based on our CEO, brought to life by NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar.
Toy Jensen hit the stage in the November GTC keynote (below). It’s work that will animate tomorrow’s smart retail shops and drive-thrus and even smart cars, thanks to NVIDIA DRIVE Concierge.
In his talk, our very real CEO also described a new supercomputer we’ll build called NVIDIA Earth-2, to advance climate science.
“I can’t imagine a greater and more important use” for all the technologies NVIDIA has created, Huang said.
Q&A With Toy Jensen
And just for fun, here’s a short Q&A with Toy Jensen.