The Metaverse Begins: NVIDIA Omniverse Open Beta Now Available

Join the open beta and develop in a new world of collaboration and photorealistic simulation. 
by Richard Kerris

Explore virtual collaboration and photorealistic simulation with NVIDIA Omniverse open beta, available now.

NVIDIA Omniverse is an open, cloud-native platform that makes it easy to accelerate design workflows and collaborate in real time. Omniverse allows creators, engineers and researchers to collaborate in virtual worlds that are all connected — the beginnings of the term Neal Stephenson coined, “Metaverse.”

The platform enhances efficiency, productivity and flexibility, as teams from across the room or across the globe can enter Omniverse and simultaneously work together on projects with real-time photorealistic rendering.

As part of the open beta, we’ve released several Omniverse applications that can be used within the Omniverse software, including Omniverse View for architecture, engineering and construction professionals; Omniverse Create for designers, creators and specialists in media and entertainment and manufacturing/product design; and Omniverse Kaolin for 3D deep learning researchers.

Early next year, we’ll release Omniverse Audio2Face, an AI-powered facial animation app; Omniverse Machinima for GeForce RTX gamers; and Isaac Sim 2021.1 for robotics development.

A fundamental breakthrough of Omniverse is the ability to easily work concurrently between software applications. Creators, designers and engineers can access several Omniverse Connectors to leading industry software applications like Autodesk Maya and Revit, Adobe Photoshop, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, McNeel Rhino, Trimble SketchUp and Epic Unreal Engine. Many more are in development, including those for Blender, Houdini, 3ds Max and Motion Builder.

Customers Reach New Heights with Omniverse

Over 500 creators and professionals across industries like architecture, manufacturing, product design, and media and entertainment have tested Omniverse through our early access program.

Global architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox used the platform to bring together its worldwide offices and have its people work simultaneously on projects.

“The future of architectural design will rely on the accessibility of all design data in one accurate visualization and simulation application,” said Cobus Bothma, director of applied research at KPF. “We’ve been testing NVIDIA Omniverse and it shows great potential to allow our entire design team to use a variety of applications to collaborate in real time — wherever they’re working.”

KPF City of London
Image courtesy of KPF.

Ecoplants, a member of NVIDIA Inception, focuses on bringing real-world experience into the virtual world in an innovative way, offering high-quality real 3D models and materials.

“Omniverse innovatively fuses development and production workflows of different software packages and across multiple industries,” said Peng Cheng, CEO of Ecoplants. “We are testing how we will use Omniverse to be widely adopted and intensively applied across our company, delivering long-term business value and enabling us to improve efficiency and reduce rendering time from hours to seconds.”

Ecoplants still
Image courtesy of Ecoplants.

Many industry software leaders are also integrating Omniverse into their applications so users can collaborate and work through graphics workflows.

One early partner for Omniverse is Adobe with its Substance by Adobe suite for texturing and material authoring. At the forefront of physically based rendering, and an early supporter of NVIDIA Material Definition Language, Substance has revolutionized the texturing workflow for real-time rendering.

“From its inception, we’ve been a strong believer in Omniverse and the vision behind application interoperability. We’re proud to be among the first to work with NVIDIA to integrate Substance by Adobe into early versions of the platform,” said Sébastien Deguy, vice president of 3D and Immersive at Adobe. “We can’t wait for our users to experience the power of real-time collaboration and unlock new, more powerful workflows.”

Reallusion is a software developer of animation tools, pipelines and assets for real-time production. Specializing in digital human character creation and animation, Reallusion software provides users with a rapid development solution for virtual characters.

“Since our early understanding of the platform, we have been working to connect our iClone character and animation capabilities through a live link to Omniverse.  We believe this open platform will enable artist, designers, movie and game makers to collaborate and design across multiple workflows in real-time with amazing fidelity,” said Charles Chen, CEO of Reallusion. “The ability for our users to move from world to world and leverage the power of our tools combined with other software tools in their workflows seamlessly and quickly will enable world building and real-world simulation.”

The Metaverse Begins

NVIDIA Omniverse has played a critical role in physically accurate virtual world simulation.

At GTC in October, we showed how DRIVE Sim leveraged the platform’s real-time, photoreal simulation capabilities for end-to-end, physically accurate autonomous vehicle virtual validation.

NVIDIA Isaac Sim 2021.1, releasing in February, is built entirely on Omniverse and meets the demand for accurate, reliable, easy-to-use simulation tools in robotics. Researchers and developers around the world can use the app within Omniverse to enhance their robotics simulation and training.

And in research, Omniverse is combining scientific visualization tools with high-quality computer graphics. NVIDIA showcased a simulation of COVID-19, visualized in Omniverse, where each spike on a coronavirus protein is represented with more than 1.8 million triangles, rendered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

NVIDIA Omniverse isn’t just a breakthrough in graphics — it’s a platform that’s setting the new standard for design and real-time collaboration across all industries.

Users can download the platform directly from NVIDIA and run on any NVIDIA RTX-enabled GPU. Learn more about NVIDIA Omniverse and download the open beta today at www.nvidia.com/omniverse.