Nvidia Corp. today announced that architects, engineers and other creators will soon have access to Nvidia Omniverse, a platform that will enable them to collaborate on 3D photorealistic, real-time engineering simulations from the office or at home.

The open beta, which will arrive this fall, follows the early access program that included Ericsson, Foster and partners, Lucasfilm Ltd. and many other early adopters.

Using the platform, remote teams can collaborate simultaneously on projects. For example, an architect in an office can iterate on a draft building design, an animator can revise a 3D scene and engineers can collaborate on autonomous vehicles to move around the worksite to deliver materials to workers – all as easily as anyone else would edit a document online.

“Physical and virtual worlds will increasingly be fused,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia, who revealed the open beta along with a raft of other products and services 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 format, the leading file interchange descriptor between 3D applications used in the industry. The platform also uses Nvidia technology such as real-time photorealistic rendering, physics, materials and interactive workflows.

Customers working in robotics, automotive, architecture, engineering and construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment all will find the tools they need within Omniverse’s collaboration and simulation suite to get their jobs done.

“We’ve had a longstanding collaboration with Nvidia around our production workflows using their graphical processing units,” said Steve May, chief technology officer 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 has the support of many major software leaders including Adobe Inc., Autodesk Inc., Bentley Systems Inc., Robert McNeel & Associates and SideFX. Blender, the free and open-source 3D graphics creation suite, is working with Nvidia to add USD support to allow Omniverse integration with its own software.

“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 at Nvidia.com/Omniverse.

Image: Nvidia