Nvidia thinks it can solve video-calling’s greatest challenges

  • Nvidia released its Maxine developer platform to improve video calling.
  • The platform enables face alignment and eye correction for more natural conversations.
  • Other supported features include dramatic bandwidth savings and video upscaling.

The COVID-19 pandemic means video calling has become more important than ever as businesses host virtual meetings, schools host online courses, and families connect through the internet instead of physical visits.

This widespread shift to video calling has posed some major challenges for the technology, and Nvidia now has a solution in the form of its Maxine developer platform (h / t: The edge).

According to the graphics giant, Maxine is a suite of video conferencing software supported by Nvidia GPUs in the cloud. And the list of improvements is pretty fascinating for the most part.

A more natural video chat experience

The first two main features that Nvidia’s Maxine enables are gaze correction and face alignment. We’ve already seen the former on iOS, but the two features essentially simulate users looking at their camera for a more natural conversation. In theory, this means that a participant does not have to constantly look into the camera and can concentrate fully on the other participants.

The platform can also lower bandwidth requirements by analyzing key aspects of video call participants. From here, the software intelligently re-animates the face in the video on the other side. It uses the viewpoints as a reference instead of streaming the entire screen over the internet. According to Nvidia, this technology can “reduce bandwidth consumption to one tenth of the requirements of the H.264 standard for streaming video compression”.

What else does Nvidia Maxine offer?

Super-resolution is another area of ​​expertise for the brand as the Shield Android TVs use AI upscaling to boost video quality from standard definition to 4K. A similar principle applies to Maxine, as Nvidia demonstrated the ability to boost a 360p video call to 720p (see the video at the top of the page).

The company also pointed to auto-frame features that were allegedly cut into the camera to “follow” a video call participant as they move. Other functions activated by Maxine are the popular virtual backgrounds, the ability to filter out background noise, language translations and virtual avatars.

Nvidia and the video collaboration app Avaya have announced a partnership to leverage the technology. We hope, however, that Maxine will have some support from other key players. We also recently saw the company release an RTX Voice app to filter out background noise. Here are some of those other features that are made available to end users in a similar way.

Next: The best video chat apps for Android

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