Free for Nvidia Studio creators with GeForce RTX gear.
After rolling out Omniverse Enterprise last November, Nvidia is opening the doors for Omniverse to everyone. Following a public beta a year ago that’s netted more than 100,000 users so far, Nvidia says any Studio user with GeForce RTX gear is welcome to give Omniverse a try, for free.
Nvidia announced several new features creative features for Omniverse users, including a new “one-click-to-collaborate” sharing technology, new 3D marketplaces and digital asset libraries, new features for gamers, and new AI-enabled 3D face modeling animation which works with audio tracks.
When Nvidia first announced Omniverse in April 2021, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described it in flowery sci-fi terms as similar to the metaverse described in Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel, Snow Crash. Since then, Nvidia’s honed the pitch a bit, describing it more recently as a “metaverse for engineers.” It’s a reference platform for 3D simulation and design collaboration in real-time.
Using Omniverse, game designers on opposite sides of the planet can build new character designs collaboratively, for example. But that’s just the start. Practical applications for collaborative 3D modeling and simulation using Omniverse extend much further, however. Nvidia is pitching Omniverse as a way to accelerate innovation in architecture and construction, engineering and manufacturing, and supercomputing.
For example, Ericsson is using Omniverse to solve a pressing problem facing telcos in the 5G era. Namely, how to most effectively build out 5G coverage in dense urban landscapes. Building architecture and composition has a drastic effect on 5G signal propagation.
Real-time 3D collaboration
Ericsson is using Omniverse Enterprise to build virtual versions of real cities, to help predict the best placement for 5G buildouts. Ericsson uses Omniverse to model radio wave propagation data to precisely model signal strength and quality.
“NVIDIA RTX-accelerated real-time ray tracing allows researchers to see precise representations of signal quality at every point in the city, in real time, which wasn’t possible before. This means Ericsson can experiment with its telecom products such as beam-forming and explore their impact interactively and instantaneously,” wrote Richard Kerris, Nvidia’s industry GM for media and entertainment.
Omniverse is cloud-native and scalable, and it’s a modular development framework that supports extensions and customization. It leverages Nvidia’s RTX GPU technology and Universal Scene Description, a 3D graphics exchange protocol originally developed by Pixar which features collaborative elements and non-destructive editing.
Omniverse platform components start with Nucleus, the platform’s database and collaboration engine. Connect helps users attach asset libraries and Digital Content Creation (DCC) tools. Kit is a Software Development Kit (SDK) to aid developers to build their own extensions, apps, and microservices. Simulation is a series of microservices and plug-ins which enable real physics simulation (starting with Nvidia’s own PhysX simulator). Finally, scalable multi-GPU rendering is handled by RTX rendering technology – a prerequisite to use Omniverse, for now.
