When NVIDIA Co-Founder and CEO Jensen Huang took the stage for his keynote, we expected incredible surprises—and one arrived just four minutes in. Jensen unveiled a Radiance Field of the entrance to Endeavor, one of NVIDIA’s two main campuses. Proclaiming, “Welcome to NVIDIA,” the 105'x29' screen filled with what was immediately recognizable as an exceptionally high-fidelity Radiance Field.
For the next several minutes, I found myself in deep thought, wondering, how did they get the floor reflections to be so clean? What Radiance Field representation did they use to do this? NVIDIA is home to some of the strongest Radiance Field representations, starting with Instant-NGP, which kicked off consumer capabilities for Radiance Fields, Adaptive Shells, which bring real time rendering rates to NeRFs, 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing, and most recently, 3D Gaussian Unscented Transform.
I didn’t have long to ponder: roughly seven minutes later, the second Radiance Field was revealed—the park known as “Bird Nest,” which connects Voyager and Endeavor. I was caught off guard by the first reveal, but this time, I had my phone at the ready to capture a glimpse of NVIDIA’s hyperreal domain.
As the keynote continued, my thoughts turned yet again to how exactly did they pull this off? The answer comes from filmmaker Lee J Buckley who captured parts of the NVIDIA campus. Buckley boasts an impressive film background, most recently leading a research studio on The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
For this capture Buckley employed a small team of film industry professionals to achieve the lighting plan and design and then used a DJI Inspire 3 drone to capture the campus. Post capture, Buckley pulled the RAW DNGs into RealityCapture and then Postshot, where the final reconstructions took place using the MCMC Gaussian Splatting. All in, this reconstruction was accomplished on a single 4090 GPU.
This is not the first time that a Radiance Field has appeared in a keynote by Jensen, but it is the first time that the imaging medium occupied the entirety of the screen behind him. At GTC, you might have caught a glimpse of one captured by NeRFGuru, Jonathan Stephens. Radiance Fields have continued to play a larger role in NVIDIA’s addresses. Radiance Fields are increasingly becoming a highlight of NVIDIA’s addresses, heralding a new age of interactive, hyper-real 3D built from simple 2D images. Their adoption is not only inevitable but already well underway.
I, for one, am counting down the days until GTC, hoping we’ll see a complete reconstruction of NVIDIA’s main headquarters.
