Who knew the GPU’s we so dearly use to satisfy our thirst for gaming could be used for an even greater good, helping the Visually Impaired. Nvidia GPU’s are being used by a company named Aira in their goal to help the Visually Impaired in the day-to-day tasks that may be easy for us but are very hard for these individuals.
A little on Aira’s services.
Aira is a service that aims to help the visually impaired to live independently by assisting them in their daily tasks – tasks that are mundane for us but a huge wall for them to leap over. Aira uses and combines a multitude of components, devices, and technologies to assist visually impaired individuals.
Aira uses your basic everyday Smart Phone with the Aira mobile App, Smart Glasses, Artificial Intelligence in the form of the personal assistant Chloe, and Human Agents for more complex situations that are available on a moments notice who are trained and certified by Aira themselves. Any information or assistance will be relayed via Audio on your Smart Glasses and Smartphone so you can get assistance anytime, anywhere.
With the use of a personal AI assistant, Chloe, who will constantly be available for the user shall they need any assistance. Assistance like identifying images with details that can be read to the individual or giving users audio-guided assistance like helping them deposit money into their bank account. Any complex task that Chloe cannot handle will be handled by Human Agents that are accessible at the tap of a button on either the smart glasses or the smartphone app.
Nvidia’s part in all this.
Nvidia has been chasing AI and Deep learning with their GPU’s ever since they came out with Volta microarchitecture with its TensorCores which surprised everyone. It’s safe to say Nvidia’s GPU’s are leading Deep Learning and AI especially with it’s recent RTX lineup that even tramples the performance of Volta based cards.
One part of Aira’s components is the use of Artificial Intelligence to assist users. As we mentioned earlier, The AI is trained with the use of Nvidia GPU’s. Any complex image recognition and natural language processing tasks will be sent to Aira’s AWS servers running Nvidia GPU’s.
Aira started using Nvidia Titan V GPU’s with Tensor Cores at first and now uses an array of RTX 2080Ti’s with the new Turing GPU Architecture that also includes Tensor cores along with the new RT (RayTracing) cores for training. With the Tensor Cores in these GPU’s This allows them to develop its deep neural networks on massive amounts of data. With this, we can only hope the capabilities of Aira to help the Visually Impaired Individuals will only get better and better.
What’s in it for the gamers?
All of this talk about Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence is good for us gamers too. Nvidia also introduced Ray Tracing Cores with its RTX lineup of GPU’s. It’s really fancy stuff and deserves a post of its own really. Basically, RayTracing generates realistic lighting by simulating the physical behavior of light. Goes without saying but, to simulate light, you’d need some beefy AI and Deep Learning capable cards, which is what RayTracing is.
With the introduction of the RTX lineup, you can’t exactly play every game at 4K60FPS with RayTracing on, it’s still quite new. But, If Nvidia continues to improve in the AI department, that would mean that we could potentially play games at 4K60fps with realistic lighting powered in the near future. More people benefit in quality of life by the improvement of AI and us gamers get better graphics in our games. A win-win situation for all.
