Highlights –

  • This partnership will integrate Siemens’ development technology and industrial design with the Nvidia Omniverse platform. It will enable users to create photorealistic virtual simulations.
  • Siemens had been building its own digital twins, but Nvidia’s Omniverse will take the concept to a new level, thanks to its idea of photorealism for images.

The concept of digital twins is related to helping model aspects of the physical world in software. Fortune Business Insights predicted that the digital twin technology and services market will generate an estimated revenue of USD 8.9 billion in 2022, which will further grow to USD 96 billion by 2029.

Siemens, the industrial technology company, has been modeling different elements of the real world in software for a long time. It is now looking to expand its approach to enable an industrial metaverse. To support this purpose and allow Artificial Intelligence (AI) digital twin capabilities, Siemens announced an extended partnership with Nvidia.

This partnership will integrate Siemens’ development technology and industrial design with the Nvidia Omniverse platform. This will enable users to create photorealistic virtual simulations.

Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens, explained, “The digital twin is the virtual representation of the real product, and the value of that digital twin is how closely we can bring the virtual world and the real world together.”

Nvidia Omniverse helping Siemens support industrial metaverse

Hemmelgarn said that bringing Siemens technology with Nvidia Omniverse will help industrial organizations make quicker decisions.

The elimination of physical prototypes is one area where the Siemens-Nvidia partnership will help accelerate industrial companies’ decision-making. Hemmelgarn also said that automotive manufacturers often had to build costly prototypes to develop new vehicles earlier.

In recent years, there has been a substantial movement toward virtualization for automotive design though it has typically used “cave,” a specialized technology running in a specific location.

Hemmelgarn said that Nvidia Omniverse could help open up the capability to visualize the new design to a much wider audience instead of automotive vendors needing a cave. Omniverse won’t require a cave to run in multiple locations, enabling manufacturers to collaborate faster on an industrial effort.

“Siemens is number one in industrial automation and industrial software, and because of this leadership position, we’re able to provide our customers with the most accurate, complete digital twin,” Hemmelgarn said. “However, with Nvidia, we can create this industrial Metaverse jointly, taking the manufacturing process and the industrial automation process to a much more realistic level, leveraging AI capabilities.”

Nvidia is not new to partnerships and has actively worked with multiple vendors across different sectors. Rev Lebaredian, Vice President of omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia, said he is particularly excited about this Siemens partnership.

“Siemens excels in the intersection of information technology and operational technology, and that’s something that we don’t do,” Lebaredian said. “There are things that we do, especially in the AI realm, and for real-time, that nobody else can do, and so the combination of these is truly unique.”

Photorealism bringing digital twins to life

Hemmelgarn said that the concept of a digital twin is not new, but it has changed in these recent years. In his opinion, the one change in the digital twin technology is the comprehensive nature of the data, which is encompassed and provided by the digital twin.

“The value of the digital twin is how closely your virtual world can represent your physical world,” Hemmelgarn said.

Siemens had been building its own digital twins, but Nvidia’s Omniverse will take the concept to a new level, thanks to its idea of photorealism for images. Integrating with Nvidia is more about making digital twins lifelike and enabling them with real-time capabilities.

Lebaredian opined that the idea of photorealism in the metaverse should not be put down with superficial things like entertainment. He noted that photorealism is crucial for serious applications, especially in this modern era of AI.

Experts’ Take

“One of the things that’s clear to us is that in order to build and create AI models we need to supply them with data, that’s essentially an encoding of the experience of the world around them,” Lebaredian said. “The only way we’re going to create truly intelligent AI is by first creating data that matches our real-world accurately, and a big part of that is how that world looks.”