Noah Basketball has installed a new 120-foot-long videoboard inside the Toronto Raptors’ practice facility to display real-time advanced shot metrics as well as game or practice footage during the team’s training sessions. Noah’s shot-tracking system leverages computer vision cameras mounted above rims to measure each shot’s arc, depth, and left-right positioning, as well as heat maps and tracking makes and misses.

The Raptors first installed Noah at its OVO Athletic Center training facility in 2018. Coaches and players typically viewed the shot analytics on iPads or computers, but that process is now easier with the real-time data being shown during practices on the massive wall-hung videoboard, which can also stream footage from practices and games. Noah uses facial recognition to identify each player and keep track of their individual shooting performances, while it is also providing automated voice feedback on shots inside the Raptors’ facility.

“My original thought was that we could have a Jumbotron courtside so that we could be doing things in practice and want to teach immediately,” Raptors coach Nick Nurse told The Canadian Press. “If they missed [a shot], they can see why. If it was too far to the left, if it was too long, it was too short, [the] arc was too flat, whatever.”

Nurse joined the board of directors at Noah Basketball in 2021. The company’s shot-tracking system is used by more than a dozen NBA teams, including the Clippers, Knicks, Trail Blazers, Suns and Warriors, as well as hundreds of college basketball programs. Ice Cube’s Big3 basketball league also partnered with Noah earlier this year.

“We use Noah everyday,” Clippers guard Terance Mann told SportTechie in August. “Once you walk in the cameras recognize your face. It tracks all your shots, your makes your arc, how accurate your shot is left to right. So I love Noah and I like the feedback it gives. It gives you the day, it gives you the week, it gives you the month, it gives you the year, so it’s pretty cool to see.

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SAN FRANCISCO — The past two years and counting, with their plague and political upheavals, have suggested that uncertainty is the order of the day. If it can be difficult to remember what prepandemic stability looked like, searching for signs to make sense of it all only feels right.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has turned to the New York-based artist and designer Tauba Auerbach for answers. In characteristic fashion, Auerbach — a Bay Area native — has responded with further questions, doggedly seeking out new ways to induce tiny transformations in our perception of randomness. Recognizing that the very existence of randomness keeps us going, the artist has committed to a practice that maps the limits of what can possibly be known.

Since 2009, Auerbach — whose pronouns are they/them — has sustained a rigorous drive for investigating both scientific and spiritual concepts, drawing equal inspiration from the precision of mathematical proofs, the intuitive features of reiki (a form of energy healing), qi gong (a gentle system of movement) and the inherent entropy of the cosmos. Consequently, Auerbach doesn’t stick to one medium, favoring instead an eclectic mix of painting, photography, design, music, sculpture and typography. Combining the curiosity of a novice with the nimbleness of an expert, Auerbach offers with each project a truly refreshing contribution to contemporary art — namely, the conviction that the world is still full of wonder.

That idea sits at the heart of “S v Z,” Auerbach’s first museum survey, which opened in December after some pandemic-induced delays. Organized by the curators Jenny Gheith and Joseph Becker, the exhibition gathers some 16 years of Auerbach’s creative output across a single floor of the museum. (Accompanying the exhibition is a remarkable catalog cocreated with the designer David Reinfurt; it features essays by the curators and the art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson — all of it printed in a custom-designed font based on the artist’s own handwriting.)

The show’s open-ended plan offers slightly angled, free-standing walls and vitrines that encourage visitors to take in Auerbach’s art non-chronologically, letting each facet of the 40-year-old artist’s practice speak for itself. At times, it’s difficult to keep the scope of this practice in mind: Works include a Bible in which all the text is rearranged in alphabetical order; album covers for musician friends like Greg Fox and Meara O’Reilly; and publications made through their imprint, Diagonal Press.

Auerbach’s most recognizable works are a series of paintings titled “Fold” (2009-12). Three are on view here, and they work as a key to the artist’s sensibility: To make these paintings, Auerbach folded pieces of canvas to create deep creases, then unfurled the material and sprayed acrylic paint onto its surface. When stretched and hung, traces of the once three-dimensional folded canvas is transformed into gradient patterns resulting in a textured surface of light and shadow. (They were included in the 2009 New Museum Triennial and Whitney Biennial, and Greater New York in 2010).

Some 10 years later, the “Fold” paintings continue to charm with their keen balance of beauty and precision, Auerbach’s assiduous process fully complementing the canvases’ delicate colors and lines. What they demonstrate is that an artist’s hand is a tool — just like a brush or a pencil — which can be used for transformation.

The “Grain” series, begun in 2017, builds on this idea, but takes it to new heights. For these paintings, Auerbach designed excision instruments embedded with fractal and helix patterns, which were then scraped across canvas topped with layers of semi-wet paint. The canvases, each encased in free-standing, heavy aluminum frames, are titled after the specific variation of curve embedded into the excision tool and hover somewhere between painting and sculpture. You are immediately drawn in by the shock of electric blue on lurid neon yellow in “Branching Fret Leveler” and a slash of interlocking red and black patchwork against a blank background in “Meander Arc”(both from 2018). In these paintings, Auerbach’s focus on method and material does not sacrifice a compelling visual experience.

But the artist’s fixation on scientific theorems and rational systems can sometimes be frustrating. For the 2018 video “Pilot Wave Induction III,” Auerbach recorded droplets of silicone vibrating to various frequencies in the cone of a speaker to illustrate a (since-disproven) theory of quantum mechanics, which infers that a substance can’t exist in two materials at once.

Near this installation hang a set of fuzzy, multicolor abstract photographs, the “Static” series from 2009, which depict the insides of cathode ray tubes. An adjoining gallery houses “7S, 7Z, 1s, 2Z.” A large kinetic sculpture from 2019, made from twisted steel cables and soap solution, it continuously produces large bubbles modeled on fascia, the connective tissue that holds our bones and organs in place.

While each of these pieces is mesmerizing — hypnotic, even — I’m skeptical of their ambitions. They seem both too arcane and oversimplified, as if the artist were trading on the viewer’s scientific naïveté, aiming to dazzle rather than guide us through the technical ideas at the core of the work. I had the same gut reaction to these works as I do to “immersive” art experiences — that my own interpretive faculties were being underestimated and had to be numbed by flashy gimmicks. That feeling can be especially nagging in a city all but transformed into a company town by Silicon Valley scions, where the flow of venture capital and sky-high housing prices have all but stamped out venues for truly subversive underground culture.

To my surprise, Auerbach and the curators anticipate this critique. A project from 2016, “There Have Been and Will be Many San Franciscos,” is an artist book published by Diagonal Press that tackles the shifting, slippery transformation of Auerbach’s beloved hometown. The book’s pages consist of black-and-white images of an unnamed San Francisco building’s facade. The museum has stacked these at an oblique angle and enshrined them in a glass case. Seen from different vantage points, the volume resembles an opaque blur, veering closer to abstract sculpture than print publication.

Unlike the more immediately eye-grabbing works that take scientific phenomena as their inspiration, “There Have Been and Will be Many San Franciscos” hinges on histories that are deeply personal for Auerbach. On their website, the artist called the book a love letter to San Francisco — “its good parts and good people and the peculiarity that runs all the way to its center.” At the same time, the work is a “way of making peace with the fact that the same place will always be different. You can’t step in the same river twice.”

If I initially thought that Auerbach was a trickster intent on making the viewer feel small and naïve, what I realized later is that they’re far more invested in making the ordinary alive and fresh. Nowhere is that clearer than in “The New Ambidextrous Universe” (2014), a sculpture made by slicing a piece of plywood into curves with a water jet and rearranging the pieces in reverse order.

You don’t need to know that the impulse for this project was a popular mathematical text on asymmetry to recognize its uncanny spark and quirky charm. Here is a work of art, ever so slightly off-kilter, that makes you wonder if you’ve ever really looked at a piece of plywood. To produce this work, Auerbach relied on a familiarity of mathematics, access to specific equipment and machinery and a network of skilled technicians. But far more, the sculpture required Auerbach’s willingness to admit their own knowledge and skills were in fact incomplete.

This is what makes Auerbach a fascinating artist and this show a sleeper hit: Auerbach possesses a sense of humility about what we can know and executes experiments that revel in curiosity rather than end results.

At the center of the exhibition sits the Auerglass Organ, a behemoth of an instrument built in 2009 by Auerbach and the musician Cameron Mesirow, who performs under the name Glasser. Fantastical, like something out of Willy Wonka’s factory, the instrument was designed to be played simultaneously by two performers who must carefully adjust their movements according to the rhythm of their partner.

Something clicked for me while watching their performance in the gallery. The colors in the “Fold” paintings seemed more iridescent; the abstract symbols and glyphs in Auerbach’s drawings appeared to pulse and vibrate. This is not to say that I suddenly deciphered the scientific bases of Auerbach’s work. But I could appreciate that method and madness can work in tandem and even be transportive.

Tauba Auerbach, S v Z

Through May 1, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 Third Street, San Francisco. 415-357-4000; sfmoma.org.

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Nvidia sees itself as the hardware overlord of the “metaverse” and has dropped some references to the operation of a parallel 3D universe in which our cartoon selves can work, play and interact.

The chip business has expanded Omniverse with new installations – an underlying hardware and software engine that acts as a planetary core that brings together virtual communities in an alternate 3D universe. Omniverse is also used to create avatars to enhance real-world experiences in cars, hospitals, and robots.

“We’re not telling people to replace what they do, we’re improving what they do,” said Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse platform, during a press conference.

The Omniverse announcements came this week during the company’s GPU technology conference. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will speak about many of these announcements on Tuesday.

Jensen like you’ve never seen him before. Source: Nvidia. click to enlarge

One such announcement is Omniverse Avatar, which can generate interactive, intelligent AI avatars, for example to help guests order meals or help a driver park themselves or navigate the streets.

Nvidia gave an example of a conversational avatar replacing servers in restaurants. When ordering food, an AI system – represented by an avatar on the screen – could converse in real time using speech recognition and natural intelligence techniques, record a person’s mood with the help of computer vision and recommend dishes based on the knowledge database.

To do this, the avatar has to execute several AI models – for example language, image recognition and context – at the same time, which can be a challenge. The company developed the Unified Compute Framework, which models AI as microservices so that apps can run in a single or hybrid system.

Nvidia already has underlying AI systems such as the Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model – a monolithic transformer language developed jointly with Microsoft. The system is now offered on its DGX AI hardware.

Omniverse Avatar is also the underlying technology behind Drive Concierge – an in-car AI assistant that is an “in-car personal concierge, ready for you,” said Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Embedded and Edge Computing.

AI systems in cars, represented by interactive characters, can understand a driver and the occupants of the car through habits, voice, and interactions. Accordingly, the AI ​​system can make phone calls or make recommendations for restaurants in the vicinity.

With the help of cameras and other sensors, the system can also detect whether a driver is sleeping or warn a driver if he has forgotten something in the car. The messages of the AI ​​system are displayed on screens using interactive characters or interfaces.

Old dog, new tricks

The Metaverse concept isn’t new – it’s been around since Linden Labs Second Life or games like The Sims. Nvidia hopes to break down proprietary walls and create a unified metaverse so that users can theoretically switch between universes created by different companies.

During the briefing, Nvidia didn’t mention that Facebook was helped to realize its vision of a future around the metaverse, which is at the center of the renaming to meta.

But Nvidia is getting other companies to bring their 3D work to the Omniverse platform through its software connectors. That list includes Esri’s ArcGIS cityEngine, which can create urban environments in 3D, and Replica Studio’s AI voice engine, which can simulate real voice for animated characters

“What makes all of this possible is the basis of USD or Universal Scene Description. USD is the HTML of 3D – an important element as it enables all of these software products to take advantage of the virtual worlds we are talking about, ”said Kerris. USD was developed by Pixar to share 3D assets in a collaborative way.

Nvidia also announced Omniverse Enterprise – a subscription offering with a software stack that helps companies create 3D workflows that can be connected to the Omniverse platform. Priced at $ 9,000 per year, the offering is aimed at industries such as tech and entertainment and will be available through resellers such as Dell, Lenovo, PNY and Supermicro.

The company also uses the Omniverse platform to generate synthetic data on which to train “digital twins” or virtual simulations of real-world objects. The ISAAC SIM can train robots using synthetic data based on real and virtual information. The SIM enables the introduction of new objects, camera views, and lighting to create custom datasets that robots can be trained on.

An automotive equivalent is Drive SIM, which can generate realistic scenes using simulated cameras for autonomous driving. The SIM takes real data into account to train AI models for autonomous driving. The camera lens models are simulated and record real phenomena such as motion blur, rolling shutter and LED flicker.

Nvidia works closely with sensor manufacturers to accurately replicate the drive SIM data. The camera, radar, lidar and ultrasonic sensor models are all tracked using RTX graphics technology, according to Danny Shapiro, Nvidia’s vice president of automotive.

The company has incorporated some hardware announcements into the overall Omniverse narrative.

Become part of the new generation

The next generation Jetson AGX Orin developer board will be available to manufacturers in the first quarter of next year. It has 12 CPU cores based on Arm Cortex-A78 designs, 32 GB LPDDR5 RAM and delivers 200 TOPS (Tera Operations Per Second) performance.

The Drive Hyperion 8 is a computer platform for cars that has two Drive Orin SoCs and offers a performance of up to 500 TOPS. The platform has 12 cameras, nine radars, a lidar and 12 ultrasonic sensors. It will be used in vehicles produced in 2024 and has a modular structure so that car manufacturers can only use the functions they need. Cars with older Nvidia computers can be upgraded to Drive Hyperion 8.

Nvidia also announced the Quantum-2 InfiniBand switch, which contains 57 billion transistors and is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in the 7nm process. It can process 66.5 billion packets per second and has 64 ports for 400 Gbps data transfers or 128 ports for 200 Gbps transfers, they say.

The company also announced Morpheus – an AI framework that enables cybersecurity providers to discover companies and alert them to irregular behavior in a network or data center. The AI ​​framework identifies subtle changes in applications, users, or network traffic to identify anomalies and suspicious behavior.

Morpheus obtains the required data from Nvidia’s BlueField SmartNICs / Data Processing Units, which have been equipped with new capabilities thanks to an upgrade to the DOCA SDK on Bluefield DPUs such as CUDA on Nvidia GPUs.

The DOCA upgrade – version 1.2 – can also “create metered cloud services that control resource access, validate every application and every user”. [and] Isolate potentially compromised machines “. Run the tools in distributed mode on SmartNICs.

Speaking of AI, the company also announced the Launchpad program, which will provide short-term access to AI hardware and software through Equinix data centers in the US, Europe, Japan and Singapore. The latter three locations are Launchpad’s first presences outside of the US, which gives Nvidia hope that its role as an AI on-ramp could be more widely adopted.

Another new offering is a new twist on the RIVA Conversational AI tool, which is said to be able to create a custom human-like voice in one day based on just 30 minutes of sample language. Nvidia believes this is just the thing for organizations looking to offer custom voice interfaces. ®

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