NVIDIA’s GTC Kicks-Off with a View of the Omniverse

NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference kicked off yesterday with a keynote by the company’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, where he introduced breakthroughs in building virtual worlds with NVIDIA Omniverse.

Huang’s presentation looked at advancing enterprise computing with new NVIDIA DGX systems and software. He touched on turning the data center into the new unit of computing with the new NVIDIA Grace CPU, BlueField-3 DPU, and DOCA 1.0 SDK; broadening the reach of AI to all companies and industries with NVIDIA EGX and Aerial 5G; and transforming transportation with NVIDIA DRIVE Orin and Atlan.

It was also announced that NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, a technology platform that enables global 3D design teams to work across multiple software suites and collaborate in real-time - in a shared virtual space - will soon be widely available.

If you missed it – Huang’s presentation can be viewed here:

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise has been in early evaluations with design teams at companies like BMW Group, Foster + Partners and WPP. It follows the launch three months ago of an open beta for individuals, which has been downloaded by nearly 17,000 users.

“Every few decades, technologies converge to enable a whole new thing – Omniverse is such an invention,” noted Huang. “Building on NVIDIA’s entire body of work, Omniverse lets us create and simulate shared virtual 3D worlds that obey the laws of physics. The immediate applications of Omniverse are incredible, from connecting design teams for remote collaboration to simulating digital twins of factories and robots. The science-fiction metaverse is near.”

Omniverse Enterprise includes the NVIDIA Omniverse Nucleus server, which manages the database shared among clients, and NVIDIA Omniverse Connectors, which are plugins to industry-leading design applications.

It also includes two end-user applications:

• NVIDIA Omniverse Create - which accelerates scene composition and allows users in real time to interactively assemble, light, simulate and render scenes.
• NVIDIA Omniverse View - which powers seamless collaborative design and visualization of architectural and engineering projects with photorealistic rendering. NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation (vWS) software, also part of the platform, gives collaborators the freedom to run their graphics-intensive 3D applications from anywhere.

Omniverse Enterprise is tested and optimized for professionals to run on NVIDIA RTX laptops and desktops as well as NVIDIA-Certified Systems on the NVIDIA EGX platform. This makes it possible to deploy the tool across organizations of any scale, from small workgroups using local desktops and laptops, to globally distributed teams accessing the data center using various devices.

Among the companies that have been evaluating Omniverse over the past two years are:

The BMW Group:

• The first car manufacturer to use NVIDIA Omniverse to design an end-to-end digital twin of an entire factory. Experts within the global production network can collaborate in a single virtual environment to design, plan, engineer, simulate, and optimize complex manufacturing systems before a factory is built or a new product is integrated.

“NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA AI gives us the chance to simulate all 31 factories in our production network,” shared Milan Nedeljkovic, member of the board of management of BMW AG. “All elements of the complete factory model — including the associates, the robots, the buildings and the assembly parts — can be simulated to support a wide range of AI-enabled use cases such as virtual factory planning, autonomous robots, predictive maintenance and big data analytics. These new innovations will reduce the planning times, improve flexibility and precision, and at the end produce 30 percent more efficient planning processes. Omniverse is a game-changer that is setting the standard for collaboration platforms for our industry.”

Industrial Light & Magic:

• Omniverse is being evaluated for a broad range of possible workflows, but particularly for bringing together content created across multiple traditional applications and facilitating simultaneous collaboration across global teams. It has the potential to remove the technical barriers that get in the way of the creative process, facilitating real-time decision-making across all disciplines.

Foster + Partners:

• The U.K. architectural design and engineering firm is implementing Omniverse to enable seamless collaborative design to visualization capabilities to teams spread across 14 countries.

“Omniverse is a revolutionary platform that has allowed our designers to collaborate and visualize multiple design changes to a scene simultaneously while working on their software of choice,” noted Martha Tsigkari, partner with the Applied Research and Development Group at Foster + Partners. “As we can review design options in parallel, we have much more time for creative design and visualization.

Integration of futuristic technologies such as machine learning will bring more opportunities to assist the creative process in the future.”

WPP:

• The marketing services organization is using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform to reinvent the way advertising content is made by replacing traditional on-location production methods with entirely virtual production. When COVID-19 restrictions were put in place, the WPP team faced limitations shooting commercials for clients on location. They used the platform to collaboratively design, build and simulate a photoreal virtual forest without having to shoot it in person.

Ericsson:

• The telecommunications company is using the Omniverse platform to simulate and visualize future 5G networks.

“The NVIDIA Omniverse platform lets our teams virtually explore any city’s unique geography — whether it is San Francisco’s hills or Frankfurt’s high-rises — and its impact on radio network performance,” explained Joakim Sorelius, head of Development Unit Networks at Ericsson. “By combining our extensive simulation expertise with the stunning visualizations of Omniverse, we bring radio network analysis to a new level, creating insights that ensure our customers get the best possible 5G experience. We see Omniverse as the future of collaboration and planning.” 

Activision Publishing, Inc.:

• The company is exploring NVIDIA Omniverse’s AI-search capabilities for its video game experiences to allow artists, game developers and designers to search intuitively through massive databases of untagged 3D assets using text or images.

Building the Metaverse — Open Standards and Interoperability

The world’s 3D industries are making great strides toward building the metaverse, a shared virtual world, by adopting open file frameworks like Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and encouraging interoperability between software applications. The NVIDIA Omniverse ecosystem continues to grow, connecting industry-leading applications from software companies such as Bentley Systems, Adobe, Autodesk, Epic Games, ESRI, Graphisoft, Trimble, McNeel & Associates, Blender, Marvelous Designer, Reallusion and wrnch Inc.

Bentley Systems, the infrastructure engineering software company, announced it is bringing infrastructure digital twins to NVIDIA Omniverse. Bentley is the first to harness real-time rendering, AI, and simulation capabilities of NVIDIA Omniverse.

For additional information visit the NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise website.

Source: NVIDIA

AWN Staff Editor