Instant Replay: NVIDIA’s 5 Top YouTube Videos for 2019

by Brian Caulfield

Update! We missed a video. The second chapter in our unforgettable Project Sol series of videos — posted to our official NVIDIA GeForce YouTube channel — has been watched more than 1.2 million times, making it one of our most watched videos of 2019. We’ve added it to this list. 

‘Seeing is believing’ is a cliche for a reason; but it might be truer to say believing is seeing.

Until this year, after all, it would be hard to believe a computer could turn a few stylus strokes into a realistic work of art; or that you could test autonomous vehicles, for millions of miles, before rubber hit the road. But someone at NVIDIA believed these things could be done — and now the rest of us are seeing it, too.

Below, we’ve queued up a quick spin through the five most popular videos NVIDIA posted in 2019.

Each — whether explaining how NVIDIA used ray tracing to recreate the Apollo 11 moon landing or riding alongside NVIDIA’s Neda Cvijetic as she provides a live play-by-play as an autonomous vehicle navigates California’s highways — will leave you believing anything is possible.

What better way to get ready for 2020?

GauGAN: Changing Sketches into Photorealistic Masterpieces

A deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research turns rough doodles into highly realistic scenes using generative adversarial networks (GANs). Dubbed GauGAN, the tool is like a smart paintbrush, converting segmentation maps into lifelike images. Read more at https://nvda.ws/2O6MHN2

Project Sol Part 2: A Real-Time Ray-Tracing Cinematic Scene Powered by NVIDIA RTX

Project Sol is a showcase of the NVIDIA RTX development platform which highlights cinematic ray-traced scenes running in real time on Unreal Engine 4. In Part 2, Sol ventures forth in his exoskeleton suit.

NVIDIA DRIVE Sim

The flexible, open DRIVE Constellation platform enables developers to design and implement detailed simulations for vehicle testing and validation. Engineers can recreate a vehicle’s sensor structure, positioning, and traffic scenario to test in a variety of road and weather conditions for the development of safe autonomous vehicles.

Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11’s Moon Landing, with Commentary from Buzz Aldrin

The anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing — one of mankind’s greatest achievements — inspired us to dramatically step up our own work, enhancing our earlier moon-landing demo with NVIDIA RTX real-time ray-tracing technology. The result: a beautiful, near-cinematic depiction of one of history’s great moments. Relive the moment with commentary from Buzz Aldrin, whose giant leap years ago inspires new generations of moonshots today.

Ride in NVIDIA’s Self-Driving Car

This special edition DRIVE Labs episode shows how NVIDIA DRIVE AV Software combines the essential building blocks of perception, localization, and planning/control to drive autonomously on public roads around our headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif.

Bonus – GTC 2019 Keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

Whether you’re a true believer, or just want to see what’s next, you’ll want to sign up, now for NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley. For a taste of what’s to come, here’s a recap of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address at the GTC 2019, where he introduced breakthroughs in pro graphics with NVIDIA Omniverse; in data science with NVIDIA-powered Data Science Workstations; in inference and enterprise computing with NVIDIA T4 GPU-powered servers; in autonomous machines with NVIDIA Jetson Nano and the NVIDIA Isaac SDK; in autonomous vehicles with NVIDIA Safety Force Field and DRIVE Constellation; and more.