Nvidia had a huge and impressive keynote at CES 2017, making a number of exciting announcements covering three main areas: artificial intelligence (A.I.), autonomous cars, and video games.
The company unveiled a new GeForce Now service, Shield TV, Nvidia BB8 autonomous car, a Shield media device, a Shield peripheral called Nvidia Spot, and more.
During the CES 2017 keynote in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made a lengthy and compelling presentation to set out the future of gaming, TV, and transportation.
Nvidia GeForce Now
Nvidia has unveiled a new cloud service called GeForce Now, enabling games to run in the cloud rather than locally on a computer. This cloud-based on-demand service can turn any regular PC into a powerful Nvidia Pascal gaming rig, allowing gamers to play the latest PC games without having to build their own PC rigs. With GeForce Now, users can access high-end PC games with the latest graphics even on low-end PCs or Macs.
"It's a simple way for new players who may not have access to a high-performance GeForce GTX gaming rig to experience great PC gaming," says Nvidia. "It connects gamers to GeForce GTX 1080 PCs in the cloud, renders games with the latest NVIDIA GameWorks visual technology and streams them in high definition to PCs and Macs."
Nvidia's new GeForce Now service can run games through a gaming distribution service such as Steam, allowing gamers to start playing just as they normally would without having to download massive files. According to Huang, it would take just a minute to purchase a game and start playing it at once through GeForce Now. Moreover, the game will be constantly updated to the latest version on Nvidia's servers, which means that gamers won't have to download and update the software themselves.
GeForce Now offers 20 hours of gaming for $25, but requires a reliable and speedy internet connection to work its magic.
New Nvidia Shield TV
Nvidia has also unveiled the latest version of its home streaming box, introducing a new Shield TV that's more powerful than ever. The new Nvidia Shield TV rocks an upgraded design, supports 4K HDR streaming, and features both a remote and game controller, and its performance is three times greater than any other streaming box currently available on the market, according to Nvidia.
The new Shield TV runs Android TV and supports 4K content from the likes of Netflix, Google Play Movies, Vudu, and Amazon Video. Existing Shield TVs will get the new features later this month through a software update.
The latest iteration of the Shield TV also doubles down on A.I. with support for Google Assistant voice control, even taking hands-free commands like Google Home. Nvidia is also offering a peripheral microphone called Nvidia Spot, albeit interested customers will have to get it separately. The Nvidia Spot can be placed anywhere in the house to facilitate voice commands, but it needs the main Shield TV to work.
Lastly, the new Shield TV also supports thousands of games and even more en route, with future games from Ubisoft set to hit the Shield TV at the same time they reach PCs. A new Steam app for Android, meanwhile, will allow users to stream games in 4K HDR to their Nvidia Shield TVs.
"The newly expanded GeForce NOW game-streaming service delivers Pascal-powered GPU performance, from the cloud, to SHIELD users," touts Nvidia.
Autonomous Car Efforts: Nvidia A.I. Co-Pilot
Nvidia is also boasting novel technology for the developing autonomous car market, touting its self-driving car system called Drive PX with A.I. co-pilot. The system not only tries to grasp the environment around the vehicle, but it will also tap A.I. to understand what's happening inside the car.
Nvidia-powered autonomous cars will be able to "see" a lot of information regarding the driver, such as where they're looking or in which direction their head is turned. In fact, the car's A.I. will even be able to read the driver's lips to understand instructions even if music is playing loudly, and it will be able to detect whether the driver is too angry to drive so it can tell them to pull over.
Nvidia dubs this advanced capability the A.I. Co-Pilot, designed to assist the driver when the autonomous vehicle's A.I. system can't drive itself because the road is not mapped or there are many pedestrians around.
Nvidia A.I. Car Platform
Nvidia Drive PX, meanwhile, marks the first phase of a new collaboration between Nvidia and Audi, taking their decade-long partnership to the next level. The two companies plan to have advanced A.I. cars roaming the streets starting in 2020, and future Audi vehicles will tackle the challenges and complexities of driving with the help of deep learning.
Nvidia Drive PX is an A.I. platform for autonomous vehicles, employing trained A.I. neural networks to understand the environment around the car and determine a safe path forward.
"Nvidia is pioneering the use of deep learning A.I. to revolutionize transportation," says Huang. "Audi's adoption of our DRIVE computing platform for A.I. cars will accelerate the introduction of next-generation autonomous vehicles, moving us closer to a future of higher driving safety and new mobility services."
Nvidia BB8 Autonomous Car
Nvidia also offered a peek into its own self-driving car efforts dubbed BB8, showing a demo at CES 2017.
The Nvidia BB8 features the Drive PX 2 A.I. self-driving computer and can understand instructions and interact with the driver in "natural spoken language." The car taps Nvidia's DriveWorks software and runs a deep neural network dubbed PilotNet, which allows for a safe self-driving performance in a dynamic and complex environment.
