NVIDIA's Omniverse Open Beta Lets Designers Collaborate in Real Time

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Tens of millions of designers, architects and other creators will soon be able to collaborate in real time, whether on premises or remotely, with the NVIDIA Omniverse™ platform, which NVIDIA announced has entered open beta, with availability for download this fall.

Bringing together NVIDIA breakthroughs in graphics, simulation and AI, Omniverse is the world’s first NVIDIA RTX™-based 3D simulation and collaboration platform that 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 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 document online.

The open beta of Omniverse follows a yearlong early access program in which Ericsson, Foster + Partners, ILM and over 40 other companies – and as many as 400 individual creators and developers – have been evaluating the platform and providing feedback to the NVIDIA engineering team.

“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. “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, realized at last.”

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.

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.

“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.”

Global Leaders Turn to Omniverse to Collaborate
Industrial Light & Magic, a Lucasfilm company and global leader in visual effects for motion pictures and television, calls out 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, vice president of Technology at Lucasfilm and ILM. “The potential to improve the creative process through all stages of VFX and animation pipelines will be transformative.”

Other early adopters of NVIDIA Omniverse include leading architectural design and engineering firms and telecommunication companies:

• Foster + Partners, an award-winning U.K. architectural design and engineering firm, is using Omniverse to help with data exchange workflows and collaborative design processes.
• Woods Bagot, a global architectural and consulting practice, is exploring the Omniverse platform to have a hybrid cloud workflow for the design of complex models and visualizations of buildings.
• Ericsson, a leading telecommunications company, is using Omniverse to simulate and visualize the signal propagation of its 5G network deployment using real-world city models.

Software Partner Support
Omniverse has support from many major software leaders, such as Adobe, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, Robert McNeel & Associates and SideFX. Blender is working with NVIDIA to add USD capabilities to enable Omniverse integration with its software. NVIDIA is also joining with other leading software providers so that all artists and designers will have the ability to leverage the collaborative benefits of Omniverse using the applications of their choosing.

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 vice president for 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.”