The 2023 AI Breakthrough Awards today recognized SYNTH3D with the Best Overall Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Virtual Reality (VR) Award. In its 6th year, these awards recognize the breakthrough companies, technologies, products and services in the field of AI around the world.
SYNTH3D is created through a partnership between Maxar and blackshark.ai. Blackshark uses its patented, generative AI to extract 3D buildings from Maxar’s Vivid™ imagery basemap, a global, cloud-free view of Earth created from satellite imagery. The AI extracts 1.4+ billion buildings and procedurally generates them as 3D buildings, which have geotypical textures applied. This means specific buildings may look different in real life, but the overall appearance of the building heights and facades reflect regional archetypes. SYNTH3D also includes digital replicas of vegetation, biomes, infrastructure and more. Users also have access to underlying semantic information about object properties like dimensions, geolocation and materials to leverage in more precise simulation scenarios.
This 3D digital twin is available in a visually pleasing and highly compatible format for a range of platforms, including NVIDIA’s Omniverse and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. Delivered as a static export or rendered on the fly through numerous plug-ins and software development kits, SYNTH3D combines the global scalability, crisp aesthetics and high-performance rendering that next-generation simulations demand.
SYNTH3D recently won an AWE Auggie Award for “Best Use of AI,” making this the second award win for the technology in 2023.
Jumpstarting the creation of VR experiences
One of the most compelling use cases for virtual reality (VR) is to make it easier for people to see, experience and interact in real-world environments in ways that were previously impossible. A barrier to making this promise a reality is the ability to build these real-world environments easily, efficiently and accurately. Until now, these environments had to be built from scratch, with development teams investing hundreds or thousands of hours replicating the desired location closely enough.
Now, thanks to SYNTH3D, developers can now jumpstart that process with a prepared environment that reflects the real world and allows them to focus their efforts on fine-tuning other aspects of the experience to dramatically improve the final product without sacrificing quality. It can be easily used by developers for use cases across a wide range of VR applications, including gaming, simulation, entertainment, smart cities and general metaverse use cases. There is still vast untapped potential for VR applications—and more hyper-realistic experiences are key to accelerating VR adoption across business and society. SYNTH3D represents a unique, AI-powered technology that can help deliver this in a scalable, cost-effective way, ultimately helping take VR to new heights.
Power your virtual reality application with SYNTH3D
Accelerate development by using a digital twin of Earth as your foundational environment.