What just happened? After effectively canceling its annual GTC conference and shifting it to an online-only format (and then later scrapping that in favor of a series of news posts), Nvidia is using alternative marketing strategies to hype up its upcoming announcements. Today, for example, Nvidia's Australia and New Zealand-focused Twitter account, @NvidiaANZ, tweeted a mysterious teaser: an eyeball emoji, a date (March 19, 2020), and a strange video with what appeared to be a blinking eye.
Frankly, nobody seems to know what this tease means. The tweet was removed shortly after going live, which could mean it was mistakenly posted. Alternatively, its removal might be part of Nvidia's marketing strategy here – companies have been known to "accidentally" leak content in the past when it serves their interests.
Either way, tech news site eTeknix managed to grab a screenshot of the tweet before it was deleted, which you can see below (though, of course, it is not animated).
As we said, nobody seems to understand what the tweet is referring to. It could be pointing toward a new advancement in foveated rendering – an eye-tracking feature for VR that aims to boost performance – or it could somehow be related to Nvidia's Ampere GPU architecture.
Regardless, we won't have to wait long to find out what Nvidia has up its sleeve. Assuming the March 19 date shown in the tweet is accurate, we can probably expect the hardware giant to start announcing its newest technology and products in just over a week.
If you have any theories regarding the potential context for this tweet, please feel free to drop them in the comments below. We will try to reach out to Nvidia for comment, but we don't expect to receive a response.