Nvidia’s Race Towards Meta! The Secret Tool is Metaverse

The companies plan to connect Siemens Xcelerator, the open digital business platform, and NVIDIA Omniverse™

Siemens, a leader in industrial automation and software, infrastructure, building technology, and transportation, and NVIDIA, a pioneer in accelerated graphics and artificial intelligence (AI), announced an expansion of their partnership to enable the industrial metaverse and increase the use of AI-driven digital twin technology that will help bring industrial automation to a new level. As the first step in this collaboration, the companies plan to connect Siemens Xcelerator, the open digital business platform, and NVIDIA Omniverse™, a platform for 3D design and collaboration. This will enable an industrial metaverse with physics-based digital models from Siemens and real-time AI from NVIDIA in which companies make decisions faster and with increased confidence.

As per the press release issued by NVIDIA, the addition of Omniverse to the open Siemens Xcelerator partner ecosystem will accelerate the use of digital twins that can deliver productivity and process improvements across the production and product lifecycles. Companies of all sizes will be able to employ digital twins with real-time performance data; create innovative industrial IoT solutions; leverage actionable insights from analytics at the edge or in the cloud, and tackle the engineering challenges of tomorrow by making visually rich, immersive simulations more accessible.

"Photorealistic, physics-based digital twins embedded in the industrial metaverse offer enormous potential to transform our economies and industries by providing a virtual world where people can interact and collaborate to solve real-world problems. Through this partnership, we will make the industrial metaverse a reality for companies of all sizes," said Roland Busch, President and Chief Executive Officer, Siemens AG.

"For over a decade, our digital twin technology has been helping customers across all industries to boost their productivity and today offer the industry's most comprehensive digital twin. When Siemens Xcelerator is connected to Omniverse, we will enable a real-time, immersive metaverse that connects hardware and software, from the edge to the cloud with rich data from Siemens' software and solutions."

The business unveiled a new collection of developer tools aimed toward metaverse environments on Tuesday. These tools include additional AI capabilities, simulations, and other artistic resources. The latest updates will be available to creators using the Omniverse Kit as well as programs like Machinima, Audio2Face, and Nucleus. According to Nvidia, one of the tools' main purposes will be to facilitate the creation of "exact digital twins and realistic avatars."

The tool draws on Nvidia's experience with 3D graphics and artificial intelligence technology, which has revolutionized how computers understand and communicate with natural language. Company Chief Executive Jensen Huang unveiled ACE in conjunction with the Siggraph computer graphics conference in Vancouver.

Advanced avatars such as those ACE could make possible are the next step in computer interaction. In the 3D digital realms that metaverse advocates like Meta and Nvidia hope we'll all inhabit, a human-looking face could help us manage our investments, tour an apartment building or learn how to knit.

In October of 2020, NVIDIA announced the beta release of its Omniverse, billed as a scalable, multi-GPU real-time reference development platform for 3-D simulation. Based on Pixar's Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX technology, Omniverse will let users create 3-D models of the physical world.

NVIDIA announced NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise six months later, allowing global 3-D design teams working across multiple software suites to collaborate in real-time in a shared virtual space. Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse development platform at NVIDIA, said in a 2021 press release that "NVIDIA Omniverse connects worlds by enabling the vision of the metaverse to become a reality."

Another NVIDIA platform, Omniverse Avatar, debuted in November of 2021. It helps developers generate, animate, simulate and render state-of-the-art interactive avatars for use in NVIDIA Omniverse. It also features AI-enabled toolsets, accelerated rendering, and simulation technology, all designed to facilitate the creation of realistic, high-fidelity avatars. While still in the development stage, developers can sign up for the waiting list and can use NVIDIA Omniverse Audio2Face to generate expressive facial animations in the meantime.

On Jan. 10, 2022, at CES, NVIDIA announced that Omniverse was out of beta and available free to consumers, a move that was likely in response to Facebook's name change to Meta three months earlier.

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