Nvidia launches Omniverse Cloud to support industrial metaverse ‘digital twins’
Posted on SEPTEMBER 20 2022
Nvidia Corp. is continuing to push the boundaries of the industrial metaverse, a virtual space parallel to the real one that simulates detailed physical assets in the virtual world, with its hyper-realistic physics simulation and collaboration product Omniverse.
Today during the company’s virtual GTC 2022 conference for developers, Nvidia announced the launch of Omniverse Cloud, a comprehensive cloud-based software-as-a-service solution for artists, developers and enterprise teams to use Omniverse to design, publish and operate metaverse applications anywhere in the world.
Omniverse is a real-time collaboration and simulation platform that enables the realistic recreation of the world at large scale. Using the platform, teams of designers and engineers can recreate and simulate cars, airplanes, buildings, factories and more. All of the parts of an engine or a factory can be designed with fully simulated physics in real time just like the real world to react as if they would in real-life situations.
These are known as “digital twins,” the fully virtual twins of real spaces and objects that are part of the industrial metaverse. As a result, they can be iterated on, changed and experimented on to understand what would happen before expensive changes need to be done in the real world.
Using Omniverse Cloud, individuals and teams will be able to design and collaborate on workflows together without the need for local computing power.
“The metaverse, the 3D internet, connects virtual 3D worlds described in Universal Scene Description and viewed through a simulation engine,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia. “With Omniverse in the cloud, we can connect teams worldwide to design, build, and operate virtual worlds and digital twins.”
Omniverse Cloud runs on specially designed cloud-computing architecture within Nvidia’s data centers and hardware running Nvidia OVX architecture for graphics and simulation and Nvidia HGX servers for advanced artificial intelligence workloads. It uses the Nvidia Graphics Delivery Network, a global-scale distributed data center network for delivering low-latency metaverse content that the company learned from its experience with GeForce Now, its low-latency cloud-based video game streaming service.
Putting digital twins to work in the real world
The power of digital twins is that they allow the simulation of the real world in the metaverse so exactly, it’s like having the benefits of being in a virtual world for testing and visualization combined with the finality of the physical world.
The retail store Lowe’s put Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise and augmented reality glasses to use for its employees by basically giving them X-ray vision. For example, traditionally, in order to read a small label on a box that’s high up, associates might need to climb a ladder to see what’s available. With a digital twin and AR glasses, they could just look up and the glasses could reveal the data of the item that should be in that position.
Associates can also see through the glasses that shelves are stocked correctly by comparing the AR holograms of the digital twins to what’s currently on the shelves — such as if the wrong products are on the shelf or if there are too few. Then they can correct it.
“With the Nvidia Omniverse, we’re pulling data together in ways that have never been possible, giving our associates superpowers,” said Seemantini Godbole, chief digital and information officer at Lowe’s.
For store management, it goes even further, using digital twins and AI store planners can optimize customer experience by examining what products are bought in combination with each other by shoppers. By then working to put these products in closer proximity to one another, examining 3D heat maps of foot traffic by customers, associates can move products closer to each other, to lower the number of steps customers must take to pick them up.
Nvidia also announced a collaboration with Digitale Schiene Deutschland, the digital division of Germany’s railway operator, Deutsche Bahn, which began working to expand the network’s capacity without building new tracks. The effort required a system of automating trains safely with less headway between each other and will involve building the first country-scale digital twin simulation of an entire track network.
Since it will involve building a photorealistic and physically accurate simulation of the entire track system, it will be a massive undertaking. It will also include tracks running through cities and countryside combined with data from many sources including station platform measurements and vehicle sensors.
Using a digital twin of the entire network built into Omniverse that runs alongside the actual railway network at the same time, being fed the same data in real time, it will be able to use AI to monitor sensors and other data and simulation to predict and prevent incidents.
“With Nvidia technologies, we’re able to begin realizing the vision of a fully automated train network,” said Ruben Schilling of the Lead Perception Group at DB Netz, part of Deutsche Bahn.
Images: Nvidia
Nvidia announces Omniverse Enterprise suite for real-time, photorealistic graphics design
Nvidia Corp. has long touted the ability of its extremely powerful graphics processing units in advanced 3D product design, and now it’s making it possible for teams to collaborate on their projects in real time in a shared virtual space.
The new Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise offering announced today at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference virtual event makes it possible for geographically dispersed 3D design and production teams to work seamlessly on complex projects, no matter where they are located, the company said.
The service is meant to enable complex product design in the COVID-19 pandemic world where face-to-face meetings aren’t possible, providing a virtual world where designers, artists and reviewers can exchange and iterate on massive files and collaborate simultaneously, from any device.
The Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise package includes the Nvidia Omniverse Nucleus server, which is used to manage shared databases among clients, and Nvidia Omniverse Connectors, which are plugins to various third-party design applications.
It also includes two end-user applications created by Nvidia itself, including Nvidia Omniverse Create, which is used to accelerate scene composition and make it possible to interactively assemble, light, simulate and render various scenes. Meanwhile, Nvidia Omniverse View is an app that enables the design and visualization of architectural and engineering projects with what the company said is “photorealistic-quality rendering.”
Also included in the platform is the Nvidia RTX Virtual Workstation software, a graphics rendering development platform that relies on real-time ray tracing, an advanced technique that draws on the power of Nvidia’s GPU architecture for rendering computer graphics more realistically.
In a press briefing, Bob Pette, vice president and general manager of professional visualization at Nvidia, and Richard Kerris, general manager of Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise, explained that the new service can essentially be thought of as a web browser for 3D design and graphics rendering.
“It shines on collaboration between artists,” Kerris said. “Real-time photorealism has become essential.”
Pette said Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise will be available in the summer and will be able to run physically on specialized RTX laptops and desktops as well as other certified systems, and also virtually on cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
“The world is happening in 3D and computer platforms keep struggling with creating replicas of the real world in digital,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “With Nvidia Omniverse, this gets an order of magnitude easier, as the vendor brings together a number of its offerings to allow enterprises to recreate and simulate the real world. We have to see in a few quarters what enterprises are building on a platform like this, but the launch customers are promising.”
Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise has been in the works for the better part of two years, with more than 400 enterprises working with Nvidia to test the platform. One of those partners, BMW Group, showcased how immensely powerful the suite’s capabilities are by using it to build what it said is a “digital twin” of one of its main factories. Through that, it said, thousands of its planners, product engineers, facility managers and experts are able to collaborate on the design and manufacture, and then simulate extremely complex new manufacturing systems that will be implemented within its factories.
“Nvidia Omniverse and Nvidia AI give us the chance to simulate all 31 factories in our production network,” said Milan Nedeljkovic, member of the board of management of BMW AG, who is responsible for production. “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.”
The telecommunications giant Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson said it has used the Omniverse platform to simulate and visualize its future 5G networks before implementing them.
“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,” said 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.”
Nvidia said the Omniverse Enterprise software will be available this summer on a subscription basis.
With reporting from Robert Hof
what is the nvidia omniverse ?
The metaverse—the 3D internet—is delivering enormous opportunities for everyone. From artists building content across multiple 3D tools, developers building AIs trained in virtual worlds, or enterprises building digital twin simulations of their industrial processes, metaverse applications are here, and everywhere.
NVIDIA Omniverse™, an extensible platform based on Universal Scene Description (USD), is helping make it happen by enabling individuals and teams to build custom 3D pipelines and simulate large-scale virtual worlds faster than ever.
NVIDIA Omniverse accelerates not only complex 3D workflows, but also enables ground-breaking new ways to visualize, simulate, and code the next frontier of ideas and innovation. Integrating complex technologies such as ray tracing, AI, and compute into 3D pipelines no longer comes at a cost but brings an advantage.