Siemens, one of the world’s leading industrial and infrastructure firms, partnered with artificial intelligence (AI) and graphics technology giant NVIDIA last week in a bid to build the industrial Metaverse.
The new partnership aims to boost the deployment of AI-powered digital twins via Siemens’ Xcelerator tool with NVIDIA’s Omniverse 3D design platform, allowing the development of an industrial Metaverse using the former’s “physics-based digital models” and the latter’s real-time AI.
According to the companies, the joint effort would deliver improvements to their production and product lifecycles and would provide firms across the industry with digital twins, real-time data, internet of things (IoT) solutions, and key analytics “at the edge or in the cloud,” among others.
Roland Busch, President and Chief Executive of Siemens AG, said in a statement,
“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”
He explained that his firm’s digital twin technologies had helped clients “across all industries” to increase their productivity, adding the partnership would offer a “real-time, immersive metaverse” to connect hardware and software across cloud computing and edge infrastructure with Siemens’ solutions.
Jensen Huang, Chief Executive and Founder of NVIDIA, added the joint venture would allow both enterprises to realise their “common vision” of building the industrial metaverse to drive the global sector’s digital transformation.
He concluded,
“The connection to Siemens Xcelerator will open NVIDIA’s Omniverse and AI ecosystem to a whole new world of industrial automation that is built using Siemens’ mechanical, electrical, software, IoT and edge solutions”
Speaking in a recent keynote speech, Busch explained how the new solution could work to restore productivity to factories experiencing downtime by allowing personnel and staff to meet in digital recreations of the facility.
He explained a use case for the new technology, stating,
“So they meet and collaborate in the Metaverse [and] immerse themselves in a digital twin of the plant, which is a perfect mirror image of the plant, and of course, it is not a still [photograph]. It mirrors exactly what’s happening in the real plant, and in real-time, down to the physical behaviour of the real robots”
The news comes just after the Santa Clara-based enterprise revealed its new 3D MoMa service tool at a conference on computer vision, it was reported in June.
NVIDIA’s solution aims to facilitate content creation for XR firms with its digital creation platform by streamlining digitisation processes and building real-time 3D (RT3D) assets.
The massive enterprise also announced it had launched its Instant Neural Radiance Fields (Instant NeRF) technology for converting 2D images into RT3D assets, complete with neural networks as well as immersive lighting, shading, texture, and other components.
