NVIDIA Launches Omniverse Design Collaboration and Simulation Enterprises

NVIDIA announces the coming general availability of NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, a technology platform that enables global 3D design teams working across multiple software suites to collaborate in real time in a shared virtual space.

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise makes it possible for 3D production teams—which are often large, diverse in skills and geographically dispersed—to work together on complex projects. Rather than requiring in-person meetings or exchanging and iterating on massive files, designers, artists and reviewers can work simultaneously in a virtual world from anywhere, on any device.

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise has been in early evaluations with some of the design teams at companies like BMW Group, Foster + Partners and WPP. It follows the launch 3 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,” says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “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 is a new platform that includes the NVIDIA Omniverse Nucleus server, which manages the database shared among clients, and NVIDIA Omniverse Connectors, which are plugins to 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—and NVIDIA Omniverse View, which powers 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.

Global Leaders Adopt Omniverse 

Among the more than 400 companies that have been evaluating Omniverse over the past two years are:

The BMW Group is reportedly the first car manufacturer to use NVIDIA Omniverse to design an end-to-end digital twin of an entire factory. Thousands of planners, product engineers, facility managers and lean experts within the global production network are able to collaborate in a single virtual environment to design, plan, engineer, simulate and optimize extremely complex manufacturing systems before a factory is actually built or a new product is integrated.

“NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA AI give us the chance to simulate all 31 factories in our production network. 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,” says Milan Nedeljkovic, member of the board of management of BMW AG, responsible for production.

“These new innovations will reduce the planning times, improve flexibility and precision, and at the end produce 30 percent more efficient planning processes,” Nedeljkovic says. “Omniverse is a game-changer that is setting the standard for collaboration platforms for our industry.”

Industrial Light & Magic has been evaluating Omniverse for a range of possible workflows, but particularly for bringing together content created across multiple traditional applications, and facilitating simultaneous collaboration across teams that are distributed all over the world. Omniverse may help remove the technical barriers that used to hamper the creative process, facilitating real-time decision-making across all disciplines.

Foster + Partners, U.K. architectural design and engineering firm, is implementing Omniverse to enable 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,” says 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.”

Ericsson, a 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,” says 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.” 

Building the Metaverse

The world’s 3D industries are making great strides toward building the metaverse — a massive 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.

A complete list of software partners is available at nvidia.com/omniverse.

Availability

NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise software is available on a subscription basis and includes NVIDIA’s enterprise support services. NVIDIA’s partner network of leading computer makers—including ASUS, BOXX Technologies, Cisco, Dell Technologies, HP, Lenovo and Supermicro—are supporting NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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