Nvidia Corp. has long touted the ability of its extremely powerful graphics processing units in advanced 3D product design, and now it’s making it possible for teams to collaborate on their projects in real time in a shared virtual space.

The new Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise offering announced today at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference virtual event makes it possible for geographically dispersed 3D design and production teams to work seamlessly on complex projects, no matter where they are located, the company said.

The service is meant to enable complex product design in the COVID-19 pandemic world where face-to-face meetings aren’t possible, providing a virtual world where designers, artists and reviewers can exchange and iterate on massive files and collaborate simultaneously, from any device.

The Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise package includes the Nvidia Omniverse Nucleus server, which is used to manage shared databases among clients, and Nvidia Omniverse Connectors, which are plugins to various third-party design applications.

It also includes two end-user applications created by Nvidia itself, including Nvidia Omniverse Create, which is used to accelerate scene composition and make it possible to interactively assemble, light, simulate and render various scenes. Meanwhile, Nvidia Omniverse View is an app that enables the design and visualization of architectural and engineering projects with what the company said is “photorealistic-quality rendering.”

Also included in the platform is the Nvidia RTX Virtual Workstation software, a graphics rendering development platform that relies on real-time ray tracing, an advanced technique that draws on the power of Nvidia’s GPU architecture for rendering computer graphics more realistically.

In a press briefing, Bob Pette, vice president and general manager of professional visualization at Nvidia, and Richard Kerris, general manager of Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise, explained that the new service can essentially be thought of as a web browser for 3D design and graphics rendering.

“It shines on collaboration between artists,” Kerris said. “Real-time photorealism has become essential.”

Pette said Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise will be available in the summer and will be able to run physically on specialized RTX laptops and desktops as well as other certified systems, and also virtually on cloud services such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

“The world is happening in 3D and computer platforms keep struggling with creating replicas of the real world in digital,” said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. “With Nvidia Omniverse, this gets an order of magnitude easier, as the vendor brings together a number of its offerings to allow enterprises to recreate and simulate the real world. We have to see in a few quarters what enterprises are building on a platform like this, but the launch customers are promising.”

Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise has been in the works for the better part of two years, with more than 400 enterprises working with Nvidia to test the platform. One of those partners, BMW Group, showcased how immensely powerful the suite’s capabilities are by using it to build what it said is a “digital twin” of one of its main factories. Through that, it said, thousands of its planners, product engineers, facility managers and experts are able to collaborate on the design and manufacture, and then simulate extremely complex new manufacturing systems that will be implemented within its factories.

“Nvidia Omniverse and Nvidia AI give us the chance to simulate all 31 factories in our production network,” said Milan Nedeljkovic, member of the board of management of BMW AG, who is responsible for production. “All elements of the complete factory model — including the associates, the robots, the buildings and the assembly parts — can be simulated to support a wide range of AI-enabled use cases such as virtual factory planning, autonomous robots, predictive maintenance and big data analytics.”

The telecommunications giant Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson said it has used the Omniverse platform to simulate and visualize its future 5G networks before implementing them.

“The NVIDIA Omniverse platform lets our teams virtually explore any city’s unique geography, whether it is San Francisco’s hills or Frankfurt’s high-rises, and its impact on radio network performance,” said Joakim Sorelius, head of Development Unit Networks at Ericsson. “By combining our extensive simulation expertise with the stunning visualizations of Omniverse, we bring radio network analysis to a new level, creating insights that ensure our customers get the best possible 5G experience.”

Nvidia said the Omniverse Enterprise software will be available this summer on a subscription basis.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Images: Nvidia