Huang kicks off Nvision with first keynote

NVIDIA'S CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, used the opportunity of his keynote on Monday, launching Nvision 2008, to say absolutely nothing new.

No new product launches, no new chips or chipset roadmaps, no talk of ATI, Intel or even other important issues like pressure to recall bad chips. Nothing.

Well, maybe not nothing. What we did get, amongst other things, were several fairly impressive 3D stereo demos, social networking involving "Interactive Pop Culture Graphics powered by Nvidia's GeForce GPUs and PhysX Technology" and minority report style multi-touch screens, which had the audience ooh-ing and ahhh-ing rather a lot.

One 'visual display' which had the nerd packed auditorium drooling uncontrollably, was Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer, who showed up in a tight little red dress and stilettos, to tower over Huang. After a couple of awkward Tom Cruise jokes, he stood, arms crossed, at a safe distance, where he awkwardly attempted to flirt.

Of course, as thrilling as the whole "there's a beautiful woman on the stage " thing was, Huang knew he couldn't rely solely on Helfer to get him through. So he reeled out a whole host of guests and guest technologies in every attempt to keep the audience from dropping off to sleep.

First up, Huang showed off a high performance computing programme from Stanford called Folding@home (which has been around for ages and is already available in all PS3's). Despite sounding like a housewives' origami club, it actually turned out to be an app which uses idle computer cycles to help simulate protein folding and misfolding. The point is for boffins to garner a slightly better understanding of how proteins grow, something which could help in the fight against Alzheimer's and cancer.

Moving swiftly on from cancer to flashy cars – as you do – Huang invited Realtime Technologies (RTT) exec Peter Stevenson on stage to demo real-time raytracing, which is apparently useful in car design and styling. Digitally prototyping a virtual Lamborghini, in something akin to a more teched out version of 'pimp my ride', Stevenson reckoned RTT would soon be able to design a whole plethora of products, including shoes, in the near future.

Having a room full of geeks, Huang just couldn't miss an opportunity to bring up the subject of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). So, up on stage popped Taehoon Kim, co-founder of Nurien Software. Nurien, it appears, is about to unleash a new MMO cum social network, complete with semi naked, hot looking, virtual avatar girls, and slightly de-nerdified guy player avatars. Noting that people could, and probably would, spend money kitting out their avatars in expensive designer virtual fashion and buying them virtual furniture for their virtual homes, Kim noted "It's going to be the next facebook, the virtual facebook."

Next up came the photography apps, which Jen-Hsun claimed were finally on the cusp of being able to properly combine multiple exposures, for high dynamic range images, eliminating the problem of contrast in exposure. Huang then went on to introduce Mighty-Soft Live labs recent release, Photosynth, which can use several photos of a place or object to make a 3D model and then display a 360 degree perspective of it. Security risk? Yes. But do we care right now? Nope.

The newest in 3D stereoscopic gaming technology was up next, followed shortly after by Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel, who concluded with his amazing demo of multitouch user interface technology on a huge 100-inch multitouch display. In fact, you could say, it was the most touching part of the whole keynote. µ