Watch Nvidia’s livestream at SIGGRAPH: Why it may be the most pivotal since 1993

The year 1993 was a pivotal year for a couple of major technology breakthroughs. It was a year of big adoption of a new internet technology called the world wide web, and it was the year that the movie “Jurassic Park” debuted, heralding the coming of age of 3D computer graphics. 

This week, the SIGGRAPH conference, the annual gathering of 3D technologists and artists, is welcoming a new phenomenon some say is as big a deal as those breakthroughs in 1993.

“This year, I believe, is a special SIGGRAPH, it will probably go down in history as one of the most important SIGGRAPHs, and an inflection point,” said Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia’s vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology, in a press briefing in advance of the conference. 

“1993 was a big SIGGRAPH, where everyone was celebrating,” Lebaredian said. “This year marks a similar inflection, one where we are seeing a new era of the Internet that is being called the Metaverse.”

Also: Nvidia’s Omniverse: The metaverse is a network not a destination

The “foundational technologies” of the Metaverse, said Lebaredian, are “all the things that people at SIGGRAPH have been working toward for decades now.”

1993 was also the year Nvidia was founded, noted Lebaredian, and today, “Nvidia is probably the most important and largest company to focus on 3D computer  graphics in general.”

Tuesday, Lebaredian is among the Nvidia executives taking part in the keynote at SIGGRAPH of Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, beginning at 9 am Pacific time.

The focus of the keynote is the Metaverse and enabling technologies for it, including what Nvidia calls its Omniverse technology or what Nvidia bills as a platform for building and connecting metaverse worlds based on what’s called “USD,” or “Universal Scene Description,” an industry standard being developed by multiple giants including Nvidia, Apple, and many others.