The Next Evolution of Digital Product Development

Digital twin technology creates a virtual model of real-world objects and systems, but they can also serve as the foundation for increasing quality and productivity by allowing companies to simulate, train, and test new products and systems on a collaborative virtual platform. 

At the HxGN LIVE Global event in Las Vegas in June, Hexagon AB and NVIDIA announced that they were collaborating on a solution to enable industrial digital twins that encompass reality capture, manufacturing twins, artificial intelligence, visualization, and simulation. 

According to Hexagon CEO Paolo Guglielmini, the company wants to allow its customers to build digital twins of everything from small components to complex assemblies and even entire factories or cities. The NVIDIA collaboration will advance these goals by combining NVIDIA technology with Hexagon’s manufacturing and reality capture expertise.

Hexagon’s HxDR reality capture platform and Nexus digital reality platform for manufacturing will connect with the NVIDIA Omniverse™ platform. Users can leverage the connected solutions to aggregate and simulate complex data for virtual factory planning and design, operational planning, and process quality optimization. The Hexagon Smart Digital Realities™ approach will allow users to build physically accurate, synchronized and AI-enable digital twins.

“Omniverse is a virtual world simulator for AI-enabled industrial applications that enables you to aggregate and simulate ultra complex data from specialized tools such as HxDR, and Nexus,” said NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, speaking the HxGN LIVE keynote. “Industries are racing to digitize their physical processes. The opportunity is immense … digitalization will enable these industrial businesses to become software defined to achieve the next level of automation.”

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“Our Hexagon innovation team has been working with NVIDIA to develop opportunities that unite reality capture, AI, simulation, data analysis and visualization with seamless collaborative planning platforms,” said Paolo Guglielmini, President and CEO, Hexagon, in a press release. “With NVIDIA technologies and Hexagon’s Smart Digital Realities, our solutions will deliver real-time comparisons of real- and virtual-world models.”

You can read more about the partnership in this recent NVIDIA blog.

Manufacturers can leverage the integration solution for virtual, collaborative planning with a unified interface, optimizing workflows.

At the conference, Hexagon CTO Burkhard Boeckem explained that these technologies can help companies aggregate data from multiple sources to create seamless virtual worlds, and then apply AI and simulation to those environments to predict performance and improve optimization. The spatial computing technology that Hexagon brings to the equation can accelerate industrial metaverse adoption.

“The fantastic has become the realistic,” Boeckem said. “The industrial metaverse is unifying multiple technologies – spatial computing, visualization, AI and digital reality technologies – that converge to form a truly immersive experience.”

Hexagon is also developing an AI-enabled web application using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform that will let teams perform real-time comparisons of digital twins and their physical counterparts to further improve planning and operations.

At the conference, Hexagon also announced its Reality Cloud Studio (powered by HxDR), an SaaS application for easy to use reality capture. Data can be uploaded directly from compatible sensors in the field to create meshed digital twins for use on-site via any device. The company also released Nexus for Developers, a development environment that allows users to build native SaaS applications for engineering and manufacturing that leverage the Nexus digital reality platform. 

Engineers that want to leverage the Omniverse-based solutions such as the one created by the Hexagon-NVIDIA partnership will need the right workstation hardware to fully take advantage of the capabilities of the platform. Dell Technologies and NVIDIA have published a brochure explaining how Dell Precision workstations have been optimized to run NVIDIA Omniverse applications. You can download it here.

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