I can’t stop watching 512 simulated bowls fall over in Nvidia’s Factory

The internet is full of ridiculously satisfying videos to fill your day with. Be it good smooth linework, things fitting perfectly and innocently into other things, or a construction line of hypnotic basic tasks, the human brain does love a good satisfying watch.

Thanks to technology, Nvidia is about to bring us an endless supply of such content using Factory. It gives users the ability to simulate robotic actions looking specifically at things like robotic assembly and synthesising collisions and interactions. 

This allows for large scale simulation and in some cases training of bots. It lets thousands of objects be interacted with at once to test the efficiency of these systems and hopefully allow for the best robotic assembly possible. It's not quite the level of making a second Earth to monitor climate change, but it's still ridiculously useful. 

It's another effort from Omniverse to allow large scale research efforts to be completed quickly and all in a software environment. This kind of work should be a massive time and money saver for industries, and hopefully us consumers will also see that benefit somewhere down the line.

One thing consumers can definitely look forward to is more satisfying videos. Ankur Handa, a Robotics Research Scientist at Nvidia recently posted a Twitter thread showing off Factory. He explains a bit about what Factory is capable of, complete with video evidence. The thread is choc full of satisfying videos with plenty of simulated robotics and more than enough nut spinning. 

The 512 bowls falling in real time is also a massive highlight of the thread. Watching them cascade down from their stacked tower is quite delightful. Those are rooky bowl numbers though, and should definitely be pumped up. We'd like to see more falling bowls in the future Factory projects, please. 

Factory is set to be presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems next month, so we should expect to see more then. Currently there are simulations available as part of Nvidia's PhysX 5.1 and demonstrations available in Nvidia's online Omniverse showroom.