Earlier this week at Computex 2023, the annual tech expo held in Taipei, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered his first in-person keynote address in almost four years.
“Wish me luck!” he said.
But luck is already on Huang’s side. The Taiwanese-American engineer probably couldn’t see the future when he co-founded NVIDIA back in 1993, but now his multi-billion dollar company appears to be at the center of it. NVIDIA produces much of the hardware driving the latest wave of artificial intelligence (AI), a wave which has started to break over the engineering profession.
With the slew of excitement over AI (Huang’s keynote was titled The Next AI Moment is Here) it’s easy to forget that NVIDIA doesn’t just make extremely powerful AI hardware. The company also makes 3D software for engineers and manufacturers. NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise, first released in 2021, has grown into an impactful platform for 3D simulation and collaboration.
“Over the years, NVIDIA has consistently introduced improvements to [Omniverse Enterprise], enabling users to work more efficiently and collaboratively in a shared, virtual environment,” Carl Flygare, Professional Graphics and Data Center product marketing manager at PNY, told engineering.com. “In 2023, NVIDIA has once again pushed the envelope, introducing a suite of impressive new features to Omniverse Enterprise.”
AI, of course, has a big role in the platform—but there’s plenty more that engineers and manufacturers should know about Omniverse Enterprise in 2023.
AI in NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise
Users of Omniverse Enterprise have access to more AI integrations than ever before, including generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, BlenderGPT or others from NVIDIA and its partners. These tools aim to allow engineers to automate tedious aspects of the design process, which Flygare says will free them to focus on more creative aspects of their work.
“For instance, AI can be used for asset generation, style transfer and even procedural generation, enabling users to create highly detailed and complex environments with less manual effort,” Flygare says.
It goes further. With AI-centered simulation tools like NVIDIA Isaac Sim for factory robots, Isaac AMR for autonomous mobile robots and Drive Sim for autonomous vehicles, engineers can also use Omniverse Enterprise to create the real-world products that rely on AI. In his Computex keynote, Huang gave the example of Taiwanese cobot manufacturer Techman Robot. The robotics company used Omniverse Enterprise, Isaac Sim, Omniverse Replicator (a physically-accurate synthetic data generator) and NVIDIA Metropolis (a vision AI framework) to accelerate the programming of its AI-driven inspection robots.
Techman Robot isn’t the only manufacturer reaping the benefits of Omniverse and AI. Huang called out many others—big names such as Foxconn Industrial Internet and Innodisk—with a special mention for electronics manufacturer Pegatron, which is using the platform to develop full digital twins of their circuit board factories (similar to BMW’s use of Omniverse for its automotive factories).
“NVIDIA Omniverse, Isaac Sim and Metropolis give us the ability to accomplish AI training, enhance factory workflows and run numerous simulations in the virtual world before we commit to an idea in the physical world,” said Andrew Hsiao, associate vice president of the software R&D division at Pegatron, in an NVIDIA press release. “Digitalizing our entire factory enables us to simulate the robotics and automation pipeline from end to end, and lets us try things out in a simulated environment, which saves time and greatly reduces costs.”
One suspects this is all still the tip of the iceberg for the confluence of AI, simulation and digital twins. But it shouldn’t overshadow Omniverse’s core functionality as an open environment for 3D collaboration.
Omniverse’s Meat and Potatoes: Unification
Omniverse Enterprise aims to unify. That principal is embedded in the platform’s native file format, Universal Scene Description (USD), an open-source framework for composing 3D data that NVIDIA frequently refers to as “the HTML of 3D.” And just as HTML laid the foundations for the world wide web today, NVIDIA envisions USD serving the same role in the metaverse of tomorrow.
All that to say that facilitating collaboration amongst 3D designers remains one of Omniverse’s main goals.
“The platform now includes enhanced real-time collaboration features, allowing teams to work together more seamlessly and efficiently. This includes features such as multi-user editing and version control, as well as the ability to stream high-quality 3D content directly from the platform,” Flygare says. He adds that this makes Omniverse Enterprise an especially appealing option for remote teams, making it possible to collaborate “as if they were in the same room.”
On the theme of unification, Omniverse Enterprise has added even more integrations with popular design software, from MCAD programs like PTC Creo to BIM applications like Autodesk Revit to game engines like Unreal Engine and beyond. Some of these integrations—called connectors—are one-way, from the design app to Omniverse, and others are bi-directional, with real-time updates flowing in both directions. Even if there’s no connector to a given app, there are many other paths to Omniverse, such as exporting and importing CAD data (Omniverse can import many of the most common 3D file formats).
There’s more. Omniverse Enterprise has also improved its ray tracing and virtual reality (VR) capabilities, and kept pace with NVIDIA’s latest graphics hardware.
Ray Tracing, VR and New Hardware Support
Real-time ray tracing has been a feather in NVIDIA’s cap since 2018, when the company’s Turing-based graphics cards first demonstrated the rendering capability. And it continues to improve in Omniverse.
“While NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise has always excelled at real-time ray tracing, the 2023 update takes this feature to a whole new level,” Flygare says, “enabling designers and developers to create hyper-realistic scenes with even greater detail and accuracy. This real-time rendering capability has been enhanced with more complex light refraction, shadow casting and environmental reflections.”
Real-time ray tracing even extends to virtual and augmented reality in Omniverse Enterprise. Users can interact with their Omniverse scenes in fully ray traced VR or AR, which Flygare says is a particular boon for those in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) as it allows them to “explore and evaluate their designs in a lifelike setting.”
Finally, Omniverse Enterprise now supports a wider range of GPUs, including NVIDIA’s latest processors as well as some of its older models. “This means that more users can take advantage of the platform's advanced features, regardless of their hardware setup,” Flygare says.
The more the merrier, as Flygare believes that Omniverse Enterprise “has the potential to revolutionize the manufacturing sector.” Given the platform’s short presence and long list of manufacturing success stories to date, he just may be on to something.