NVIDIA Announces Omniverse Open Beta, Letting Designers Collaborate in Real Time — from Home or Around the World
NVIDIA has launched the open beta of its Omniverse platform, aimed at enabling real-time collaboration for designers, architects, and creators globally. This follows a yearlong early access program with over 40 companies, including Ericsson and Lucasfilm. The platform leverages NVIDIA's advanced graphics and simulation technologies to merge physical and virtual worlds, enhancing project collaboration in various industries, such as robotics and media. Omniverse supports Pixar's Universal Scene Description format, allowing seamless interoperability between applications.
- Launch of the Omniverse open beta, expanding collaboration capabilities.
- Involvement of major companies like Ericsson and Lucasfilm during the early access phase.
- Utilization of Pixar's Universal Scene Description for improved 3D application interchange.
- Potential growth in various industries including robotics, architecture, and entertainment.
- None.
Photorealistic, 3D Simulation and Collaboration Platform Open Beta Follows Early Access Program with Ericsson, Foster + Partners, Lucasfilm, 40+ Others
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 05, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GTC – 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 today 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.”
A complete list of software partners is available at nvidia.com/omniverse.
Pixar USD: Foundation for 3D Application Interchange
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.
How to Get Omniverse
Sign up for the Omniverse open beta program at nvidia.com/omniverse. It will be available for download this fall.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI — the next era of computing — with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world. More information at https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/.
For further information contact:
Kasia Johnston
NVIDIA Corporation
+1-415-813-8859
kasiaj@nvidia.com
Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: the benefits, impact and availability of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform; physical and virtual worlds increasingly being fused; NVIDIA and Pixar being committed to advancing the state of the art in computer graphics; the potential to improve the creative process through all stages of VFX and animation pipelines being transformative; and how Autodesk’s users will respond to Omniverse are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic conditions; our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to our existing product and technologies; market acceptance of our products or our partners' products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company's website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
© 2020 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, NVIDIA RTX and NVIDIA Omniverse are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners.
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