What is Omniverse?
Today, we live in an era where people are crazy about creating Robots and using them along with Machine Learning for automation. Machine Learning and Robotics are the most targeted fields these days for various inventions to bring revolutionary change.
So Let’s talk about one of the top 100 best inventions of 2021, Nvidia Omniverse.
Omniverse is a single open-source, extensible platform with many SDKs integrated for creating different applications and extensions just like Unity. It makes it very easy for users to create a realistic virtual space for real-world purposes with its entire set of different tools. It also helps users create virtually stunning computer graphics with physically accurate simulation along with virtual collaboration.
Omniverse is a platform that manages to serve the needs of a variety of groups, including 3D Designers, Game Developers, Machine Learning Engineers, and ROS Developers (Robotics Software Developers).
As we know there is a need behind every Invention, major use cases of Omniverse are :
- Train the simulation of Robots
- End-to-end simulation of Automated Vehicles
- Creating Digital twins
- Creating objects and photo-realistic avatars for your own metaverse
- Converting audio to an animated character using Audio2Face
- Platform to develop games and create virtual spaces
- Creating objects and animated avatars for the metaverse
- Earth-2 (The digital twin of the earth) is in the development phase will help greatly in weather forecasting
- Instant 3D Reconstruction
- Real-time virtualization and collaboration
And many more are yet to be discovered.
Top tier Industries have already taken the steps toward expanding Omniverse Ecosystem :
So Let’s get a brief idea about the Nvidia Omniverse.
Definition from Nvidia:
“NVIDIA Omniverse™ is a scalable, multi-GPU real-time reference development platform for 3D simulation and design collaboration, and based on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and NVIDIA RTX™ technology. “ [credits: Nvidia]
Simply it can be summarized as a tool or platform to design and create objects in USD (Universal Scene Description) file format and work on a common Scene/object collaboratively.
So, let’s dig deeper into the Omniverse platform.
1. NUCLEUS
Let’s say you have a Scene, you want to store somewhere, NUCLEUS is a file server (database) that stores and shares USD file types, used by most of the top industry platforms, by allowing live linking and syncing between different applications and different people.
2. CONNECT
One of the highly used elements of Omniverse is CONNECT. Consider there are multiple developers working on a single scene, creating different objects and checking if the object is fitting perfectly in the scene.
In such cases using Connect which is a Collaborative tool comes in handy to edit and design objects and update the Scene
Still wondering, where and how objects are created in Omniverse?
3. KIT
Omniverse Kit comes into the picture for handling very large scenes and very complex tasks allowing it to handle the physics and dynamics like the real world.
Let’s get an overview of the Applications of the Omniverse Kit
Create: It is a platform similar to any 3D designing tool which allows us to stage scenes, and add animations, lights and shadows, and effects. It also renders the scene beautifully.
View: View is used for viewing scenes, objects, the digital world, or metaverse in real-time.
Machinima: This tool allows us to put together the cinematics. The storytelling tool takes components from different games, brings in the environment to create stories
AudioToFace: Converts Sound clips to animation in the faces of characters such that emotions and inflection are also considered.
Kaolin: It is a tool used for 3D Deep Learning research.
There are various extensions and core extensions as well to provide desired functionalities. The base of the Omniverse kit consists of tools that hold the purpose of creating a platform that’s created.
USD: It is a universal extension created by Pixar and used by most of the top technologies to create objects and scenes so that objects are accessible on any platform. It is an open-source API and file framework for complex scenes. It allows simultaneous collaboration for large teams in different departments working on the same scene.
PHYSX: Physx allows users to have the look and feel of real-world dynamics
and simulation.
RTX: RTX technology has made it possible to render objects in real-time by ray tracing and referenced path tracing.
4. SIMULATION
Simulation of objects like the real world is possible in the omniverse with powerful tools like Physx, Blast, and Flow for rigid & soft body dynamics, combustible fluid, smoke, fire and water, and fracture and destruction.
Issac SIM: The simulation used for training robots to perform basic tasks can be done with Isaac SIM SDK, primarily used in Robotics
Drive SIM: The simulation used for training autonomous driving cars in the digital world, when released in the real world is a perfectly trained model. This simulation SDK is primarily used for Autonomous driving vehicles
5. RTX RENDERER
An advanced, multi-GPU renderer based on NVIDIA RTX that powers both real-time ray tracing and referenced path tracing uses RT cores and Tensor cores in the architecture to render scenes along with SDKs like DLSS, NRD,
King of Platforms for 3D Scene and Object Creation
After a deep dive into this amazing platform, If you look for other platforms that can be used as alternatives, there is no such platform available in the market that provides all the SDKs, tools, applications, and extensions offered in a single place like Nvidia Omniverse. Thus, Omniverse can be considered the king of platforms for 3D scene and object creation
In the new era of the Digital World and Virtual Reality, Omniverse is going to be the support system for all the developers and designers out there. Admittedly, Omniverse revolutionized the world of 3D designers and developers by allowing them to do things that were just an imagination which is why it was recognized as one of the best 100 inventions of 2021.
Credits:
A whole-heartedly thanks to our team and especially Shailja for contributing to this article.
