How Nvidia Inception Accelerates Digital Twin Startups

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Nvidia Inception is a free program designed to help startups develop faster through access to technology, discounts and experts. At the Nvidia GTC Conference, several digital twin startups explained how the program combined with the Omniverse platform accelerated their product and marketing development.

The core of Nvidia’s Inception program provides appropriate technical expertise within Nvidia, preferential pricing and access to cloud credits, introductions to venture capital firms and marketing support. Striking at GTC were the different ways in which companies translated digital twins into new business models.

Blackshark creates a high-fidelity replica of the Earth for gaming and corporate customers. Rios.AI uses digital twins to improve the design and programmability of a robot-as-a-service offering. Radical develops tools to translate consumer-grade video into 3D digital twins of humans.

Blackhawk goes global with digital twin

Blackshark started out as a gaming studio in Austria and worked with Microsoft to build the 3D world used in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. They raised $20 million a year later and became an Inception partner. The company has developed an AI pipeline for analyzing new satellite and drone imagery to generate an updated digital twin of the entire planet in about 72 hours.

A key innovation is a patented data labeling process that helps identify more than 1.4 billion unique structures from the images and align them with the final 3D digital twin. This innovation has accelerated the labeling process 10-100 times, depending on the type of data.

Gastao De Figueiredo, senior vice president of strategic partnerships at Blackshark, said the Inception team did a fantastic job building the community of potential customers. This week, he received an email from another Omniverse customer hoping to improve real-world simulations for drone deployments. The Omniverse platform also helps reduce friction with new customers thanks to its USD plugin ecosystem.

Rios.AI uses digital twins to collaborate with customers

Rios.AI is accelerating robotic deployments for common applications such as box packing and helping to align funding with usage rather than capital expenditure. Rios uses digital twins to collaborate with customers on implementation and to streamline programming and testing.

Clinton Smith, co-founder and CTO at Rios.ai, said the initial value of the Inception program was the rebates. The company deploys GPUs in each robotic platform to keep latency low, leading to significant hardware costs. They also take advantage of cloud credits to reduce their training costs.

Radical has developed a scalable human motion tracking platform that can convert 2D video into 3D animations of the motion. The latest implementation can map live video feeds from multiple participants in a shared metaverse in near real time.

Radical CEO Gavan Gravesen said they are always exploring options to optimize the performance of their algorithms to improve user experience and reduce cloud processing costs. He said the technical support they received as part of the Inception program was fantastic and helped them get their new service up and running quickly.

Omniverse also helped Radical improve the versatility of its service for larger content studios, broadcasters, small teams, and prosumer enthusiasts. Moving 3D geometry across different tools has been an age-old challenge for 3D applications. “Omniverse is a powerful platform to provide seamless acceleration and ultimately democratization of the 3D content creation process,” said Gravesen.

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This post How Nvidia Inception Accelerates Digital Twin Startups

was original published at “https://venturebeat.com/2022/03/23/how-nvidia-inception-accelerates-digital-twin-startups/”