Huang described AI as being the future of video games, with it creating everything from animation to voice overs. — CHRISTOPHER FAM/The Star
TAIPEI: Graphics giant Nvidia showed off its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) that makes NPCs (non-player characters) more intelligent with better conversation skills and personalities that develop over time to enable developers to craft unique gaming experiences for each player.
Its president and CEO, Jensen Huang, showcased a demo that was entirely artificial intelligence-powered, featuring animations, voices, and lines generated by ACE.
Huang says: "We have a service that includes pre-trained models that game developers can come and modify and enhance for your own application, for your own story, because every game has a different story."
He adds that the demo was developed in partnership with Convai, a framework and avatar toolmaker.
"All of the facial animations (were) completely done by the AI.
"We have made it possible for all kinds of characters to be generated; they all have their own domain knowledge.
"You can customise it so that everybody's game is different, and look how wonderfully beautiful and natural they are," says Huang during the Nvidia keynote at Computex 2023.
Part of ACE is Nvidia NeMo, a large language model that can be used for generating character backstories and personalities that match a game's setting.
Other models include Riva for speech recognition and text-to-speech, which makes real-time voice conversations possible, and Omniverse Audio2Face, which generates facial animations for characters based on a provided voice.
"This is the future of video games – not only will AI contribute to the rendering and synthesis of the environment, it will also animate the characters.
"AI will be a very big part of the future of video games," Huang added.
The same keynote also saw the unveiling of other Nvidia server-related offerings, with the company intending to bring generative AI to the cloud space with its DGX GH200 enterprise Superchip, Grace Hopper Superchip, graphics processing server HGX H100, and MGX modular architecture.
Huang also unveiled Nvidia's first full-reference robotics stack with the Nova Orin.
LifestyleTech will also be covering other highlights from this year's Computex throughout the week, so stay tuned.
