Technology for seamless collaboration on 3D projects now in open beta

Source: NVIDIA. Marbles at night, displayed by NVIDIA Omniverse.

Designers, architects and other creators will soon be able to collaborate in real time, whether on premises or remotely, with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. NVIDIA announced that Omniverse has entered open beta, with availability for download this fall (roughly Q3/Q420).

Bringing together NVIDIA breakthroughs in graphics, simulation and artificial intelligence (AI), Omniverse is the world’s first NVIDIA RTX-based* 3D simulation and collaboration platform. It fuses the physical and virtual worlds to simulate reality in real time and with photorealistic detail.

Using the platform, remote teams can collaborate simultaneously on 3D graphics-heavy projects – such as architects iterating on 3D building design, animators revising 3D scenes, and engineers collaborating on autonomous vehicles – as readily as they would jointly edit a 2D document online.

Richard Kerris, GM, Media and Entertainment, NVIDIA, called Omniverse an "open platform for real-time collaboration and true-to-reality simulation". He said speed is typically sacrificed for photorealism and vice versa, but Omniverse offers "stunning quality of rendering and we can display it anywhere in the world".

The open beta of Omniverse follows a year-long early access programme in which over 40 marque brands – and as many as 400 individual creators and developers – have been evaluating the platform and providing feedback to the NVIDIA engineering team. According to Kerris, lighthouse customers have included Volvo, IKEA and BMW.

“Physical and virtual worlds will increasingly be fused,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, who revealed the open beta in his digital keynote address at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC). “Omniverse gives teams of creators spread around the world or just working from home the ability to collaborate on a single design as easily as editing a document. This is the beginning of the Star Trek Holodeck, realised at last.”

In Star Trek's Holodeck, characters in the science fiction TV series are able to interact in different virtual reality environments. In his keynote, Huang also referenced the Metaverse, a virtual reality-based version of the Internet described by science fiction author Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash. He noted that platforms like Mindcraft and Fortnite are early versions of Metaverses where avatars and humans can gather and connect with friends. "If the last 20 years were amazing, the next 20 will see nothing short of science fiction," he said.

Omniverse is based on Pixar’s widely-adopted Universal Scene Description (USD), the leading format for universal interchange between 3D applications. The platform also uses NVIDIA technology such as real-time photorealistic rendering, physics, materials and interactive workflows between industry-leading 3D software products. Pixar USD brings a unified method and format for seamlessly sharing most aspects of a 3D scene while maintaining application-specific data, unlike most export/import workflows. The structure allows for only changes to be relayed, enabling edits to objects, environments and other design elements within the collaborative scene to be efficiently communicated between applications while maintaining overall integrity.

Omniverse enables collaboration and simulation that are essential for customers working in the robotics, automotive, architecture, engineering and construction, manufacturing, and media and entertainment industries. As Huang put it in his keynote, Omniverse will be where people can "create the future and then fabricate it in the real world", and where robots can "learn how to be robots":

“We’ve had a longstanding collaboration with NVIDIA around our production workflows using their GPUs,” said Steve May, CTO at Pixar. “And with their adoption of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description for Omniverse, it continues even more so; together we are committed to advancing the state of the art in computer graphics.”

“Omniverse represents the platform of the future for all aspects of virtual production,” said Bill Warner, Avid Technology founder and Chairman of Lightcraft Technology.

“We’ve been actively evaluating this platform from NVIDIA and have made the decision to base our entire product line on this amazing new technology.”

Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a Lucasfilm company and global leader in visual effects for motion pictures and television, highlighted the importance of having the ability to improve creative process and animation pipelines. “NVIDIA continues to advance state-of-the-art graphics hardware, and Omniverse showcases what is possible with real-time ray tracing,” said Francois Chardavoine, VP of Technology at Lucasfilm and ILM.

“The potential to improve the creative process through all stages of VFX and animation pipelines will be transformative.” VFX refers to visual effects.

Other early adopters of NVIDIA Omniverse include:

- Foster + Partners, an architectural design and engineering firm with an extensive presence in the Asia Pacific and Middle East, is using Omniverse to help with data exchange workflows and collaborative design processes.

- Woods Bagot, a global architectural and consulting practice with studios in Asia Pacific and the Middle East, is exploring how the Omniverse platform enables a hybrid cloud workflow for the design of complex models and visualisations of buildings.

- Ericsson, the telecommunications company, is using Omniverse to simulate and visualise the signal propagation of its 5G network deployment using real-world city models.

Omniverse already has support from many major software leaders, such as Adobe, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Robert McNeel & Associates and SideFX. Autodesk is optimistic about how its millions of users worldwide will respond to Omniverse.

“The importance of our two-year collaboration with NVIDIA cannot be overstated,” said Amy Bunszel, Senior VP, Design and Creation Products at Autodesk.

“Projects and teams are becoming increasingly complex and we are confident Autodesk users across all industries will share our enthusiasm for Omniverse’s ability to create a more collaborative and immersive experience. This is what the future of work looks like.”

NVIDIA continues to join with more software providers. The company added that Blender is working with it to add USD capabilities to enable Omniverse integration with its free, open-source software for 3D creation.

Explore:

Sign up for the Omniverse open beta programme. The software works on both RTX Windows and Linux systems.

Browse the list of software partners.

Watch Huang discuss Omniverse at his GTC keynote - this video also includes an animated version of the marbles.

*NVIDIA’s RTX platform uses dedicated RT Cores for ray tracing and Tensor Cores for AI, resulting in better performance. RT Cores feature a microarchitecture tuned for better ray-tracking performance, while Tensor Cores enhance AI-related performance. NVIDIA's Ampere architecture is the second generation of RTX.