NVIDIA'S AI TOOL CAN TURN THE REAL WORLD INTO VIRTUAL REALITY

Ever wondered while playing games or experiencing virtual reality: how can this be closer to the real world? NVIDIA might have an answer.

The company has developed an AI tool which can turn video into a virtual landscape. NVIDIA has cooked up a way for this AI tool to chew on existing videos and use the objects and scenery found within them to build interactive environments. NVIDIA's research for this artificial intelligence tool is not just a significant technical achievement, it is also going to make life easier for artists and developers to craft lifelike virtual worlds.

Instead of having to meticulously design objects and people to fill a space polygon by polygon, they will be able to use existing machine learning tools to roughly define those entities and let NVIDIA's neural networks complete the rest.

"NVIDIA has been creating new ways to generate interactive graphics for 25 years – and this is the first time we can do this with a neural network," Vice President of Applied Deep Learning at Nvidia, Bryan Catanzaro, said in a statement. "Neural networks – specifically – generative models are going to change the way graphics are created."

There is no denying that NVIDIA's research is a notable step forward in digital imaging and,  in time, it may help change the way we create and interact with virtual worlds. For commerce, for art, innovations and more. Even so, the existence of these tools also means the line between real events and fabricated ones will continue to grow more tenuous, and pretty soon we'll have to start really reckoning with what these tools are capable of.