Nvidia CEO demos Minority Report style interface at Nvision keynote

Posted at: 10:29am 27th August 2008 by Mark Mackay

Jen-Hsun Huang kicks off the Nvision visual computing show with a keynote full of spectacular demos

Nvision 2008: Nvidia launched its first Nvision visual computing show in San Francisco, California on Monday. Billed in Roald Dahl cum PR speak style as 'the great big visual computing show', Nvision is a three day event comprised of conferences and technology exhibits all focussed on graphics and GPUs. As well as plenty of product plugs, Nvision is also hosting the Electronic Sports World Cup and Nvidia’s GeForce LAN event which will attempt to break the world record for the longest non-stop LAN party.

Officially kicking off the proceedings, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, Jen-Hsun Huang delivered a keynote speech to an audience of journalists and industry professionals. Nvidia seemed keen to focus on its support of 3D stereoscopic games, which we've previously seen in action on Zalman's Trimon 3D monitors. During his keynote, Jen-Hsun showed an awesome 3D demonstration with a cinema-sized screen playing Age of Empires III. The 3D glasses on everyone’s seats were met with a lot of scepticism but the intricately 3D modelled, isometric real-time strategy game looked simply stunning.

Perhaps the most impressive demonstration of the opening day came from founder of Perceptive Pixel, Jeff Han, with a true multi-touch display producing results heavily reminiscent to those in Stephen Spielberg’s movie Minority Report. Both Huang and Han, could manipulate media using both hands simultaneously, cutting, pushing and animating images on the display. The most impressive characteristic of the display was its lightning quick response time as it immediately reacted to every touch from every digit. Although we weren't able to take any video at the show, we did find an official video from Perceptive Pixel, so you can a video of the tech in action below.

Other technologies on show included Microsoft's PhotoSynth, an application that creates interactive 3D models using multiple 2D photos or images of the same object or scene. The software recognises when an object is the same but shot from a different angle, meaning that more pictures make for a more complete model. It's well worth the small install to check out - the 'synth' of the canals of Venice is a great demo of the technology.