Updated: NVIDIA Outs Project RON Holographic AI-Powered Holographic Assistant
A sneaky photographer managed to snap a shot of a slide on an apparent NVIDIA employee's laptop that points to "Project RON," which looks to be some kind play in the digital assistant space. Nothing has been announced, of course, but if Project RON is real, it may indicate that NVIDIA is making a move into the smart home device category.
That would not be surprising, for a number of reasons. Smart speakers are growing in popularity, with Amazon leading the way, followed by Google, Apple, and others (in that order). According to recent data from research firm Consumer Intelligence Researcher Partners (CIRP), there are currently 66 million smart speakers in the US alone.
We do not know what exactly Project RON is, only that someone sent WCCFTech a photo that was supposedly taken on the sly. Things get blurry when blowing up the image, but it appears that the developer portion points to skills related to both artificial intelligence and holograms.
NVIDIA is heavily invested in AI technology. That also happens to be the key tech behind digital assistants like Alexa, Google Now, Siri, and Cortana. We are dangling off the speculative edge here, but if the slide and photo are real, it could point to a hologram-based AI assistant. Maybe.
That seems a bit farfetched. More likely the hologram tech would be used for some kind of 3D scanning and mapping, perhaps something similar to HoloLens, but in a different type of non-wearable device. Or maybe something completely different—there are a ton of possibilities.
Now that the cat is out of the bag (again, assuming this is real), more leaks are likely to follow in the lead-up to the launch of whatever this is.
Updated 4/1/2019
Well, well, well. It looks as though Project RON wasn't actually an upcoming product from NVIDIA. It's actually an April Fools' prank that we fell for. You can see a video of the fictional holographic device below
