Enter the Omniverse Nvidia’s new platform technology brings together architects and other stakeholders in a visually rich, real-time collaborative environment that has live links to the leading CAD and BIM tools, writes Greg Corke
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few years ago, Nvidia wowed its AEC and manufacturing customers with Holodeck, an experiment in using virtual environments for collaborative workflows. The platform was designed to bring together architects, designers and stakeholders from anywhere in the world to build and explore projects in a highly realistic, collaborative, and physically simulated VR environment. The visual quality of the demonstration cars and buildings was stunning, but the 3D models represented a snapshot of a project in time. With distributed teams using many different tools, designs are constantly evolving, and a linear stepped process of import and export wasn’t going to solve the real workflow challenges faced by global AEC firms. What was needed was a dynamic way for data to be shared and Nvidia looked to the visual effects industry for inspiration. 32
May / June 2020
Around the same time, Pixar brought out USD (Universal Scene Description), an open framework for the interchange of 3D computer graphics data, specifically focused on collaboration. As Richard Kerris, Industry GM for M&E at Nvidia, told AEC Magazine, USD “standardises toolsets and environments and models and all of the things that go into creating an object or an environment.” USD was originally designed for visual effects and animation, but it immediately started to gain traction in other industries. It provided a means of transferring files without importing or exporting, but having it happen live between applications. “That was when the team looked at what was working and was not working with Holodeck and decided that, if they standardised around USD, they could take that same approach, but now have an environment of collaboration that comes through this open standard,” explains Kerris.
Holodeck was very focused on VR, but laid the foundations for a new, much broader, collaboration platform called Omniverse, which Kerris describes as “Google Docs for your world.” Omniverse essentially allows teams to work together, interactively using their 3D design tools of choice. Data from multiple applications can be seamlessly streamed into the Omniverse and the resulting asset, be it a building, product or VFX scene, can be interacted with live in a real-time, ray-traced viewport accelerated by Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs.
The AEC experience Omniverse can serve multiple industries, including Media and Entertainment and manufacturing, but it’s the AEC market that’s getting the most attention, as Kerris explains. “AEC, in particular, really gravitated towards us because they’ve always had this strong need to collaborate, www.AECmag.com
