At Computex, one of Asia’s most high-profile tech exhibitions, the keynote by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on 19th May showcased some of the company’s latest visualisation and simulation innovations – developments in which Agility3 has played an important role.
Jensen showed the audience the highly precise 3D digital model we created of a complex urban intersection in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. He then compared the scene with real-world footage, explaining how pioneering AI specialist Linker Vision is using this combination to teach its AI solution to recognise and understand objects, environments, and situations.
Innovations like this put Agility3 on the cusp of a revolution in 3D data – namely, the use of high-quality synthetically generated video to train the AI models that are underpinning the development of smart cities throughout the world.
And not only to train them, but to do so far more rapidly and cost-effectively, as this synthetic data requires no frame-by-frame, manual tagging of objects. The process happens automatically, delivering game-changing savings and dramatically cutting project timelines.
Linker Vision, NVIDIA, Agility3: training AI to respond
Linker Vision’s latest solution is built on the NVIDIA Omniverse product, using Agility3’s 3D content within it (you can see a video clip here:).
The synthetic video data trains the AI in Linker Vision’s solution so that it not only identifies urban scenarios such as traffic incidents, but can react immediately to them and take, or prompt, action.
This could be an automated or human response such as alerting emergency services or activating changes to traffic signal timings to minimise disruption, danger, and other negative outcomes.
Smart cities: overcoming AI challenges with Agility3
The benefits of these connected urban surroundings are many: more efficient and responsive services, improved public safety, enhanced resource management, and greater sustainability.
And this is certainly a growth market. The United Nations, for example, predicts that 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, and it’s estimated that there will be 100 smart cities in existence by 2030 – a mere five years away at the time of writing.
However, there are challenges with smart city systems and their insatiable hunger for visual data – challenges that NVIDIA, Linker Vision and Agiity3 are solving.
The privacy issues associated with using CCTV footage, for example, simply don’t apply to the use of synthetically generated visual data.
Equally, the difficulty and cost of trawling through acres of CCTV footage to find an example of a specific kind of incident or situation that the AI model needs to be able to recognise – a motor vehicle accident, for example – vanishes.
Instead, these scenarios can be rapidly created from scratch. But the real game-changer isn’t just the realism of these synthetic visuals—complete with weather effects, lighting conditions, and other visual characteristics. It’s that we can create huge numbers of varied examples, enriching the training data to cover a much broader range of possible situations. This ability to rapidly generate comprehensive, diverse datasets ensures that AI models are prepared for any scenario a smart city might encounter.
These fast-track routes to a constantly evolving repository of phenomenally realistic and instantly actionable visual content which will become ever more critical for smart cities development. Indispensable, in fact.
Agility3 and AI: where next?
The existing applications for Agility3’s 3D visualisation and virtual reality solutions will continue to gather momentum—particularly in rail, road, and driving—as we continue to support high-profile clients like Transport for London (TfL) and leading simulation partners such as AVSimulation.
But AI in a smart-cities context steps everything up a gear. We’re providing the foundation that smart city AI must be built on in order to make it not only effective, but financially viable – and therefore possible in the first place.
Are you interested in synthetic data? Then get in touch with us today at info@agility3.co.uk or call +44 (0) 1438 488066
