The Industrial Omniverse is here

A breakthrough collaboration between NVIDIA and Nextspace is opening the Omniverse to the worlds of engineering, infrastructure, and asset management where the creation of a platform on which digital engineers can apply the power of the Omniverse to real-world asset, engineering, and business data optimisation is being developed.

Nextspace and NVIDIA share the desire to build tools that empower others to create. NVIDIA has invested in Nextspace as part of a recent pre-Series A convertible note raise.

Founder and CEO of Nextspace, Mark Thomas, explains how collaboration between NVIDIA and Nextspace is opening the Omniverse to the worlds of engineering, infrastructure, and asset management“We share NVIDIA’s vision of the massive potential of GPU’s for the application of AI simulation and prediction to optimise the way we manufacture, distribute goods and services, design buildings and cities. Complex digital twins bring multiple data sources into a single model to identify and visualise opportunities for people to reduce waste and risk. This creates healthier, safer businesses and communities.”

“For this vision to be realised the Omniverse needs feeding with data, not just any data, but organised relevant structured data. The better structured data is to start with, the more valuable it is for AI and simulation applications.

“Nextspace ‘s platform is designed to gather, collate, curate and provide that structure needed for the full potential of the Omniverse concept to be realised. Throwing all the data in a big pile and assuming AI will sort it all out simply does not work.” 

Digital twins and the federation of these in the Omniverse provide a systematic way to store, present and analyse a computer copy of our world. Creating a complex Digital twin is often a tortuous journey, connecting and making sense of disconnected and incomplete data spread over multiple IT systems and owners.  By applying the proven principals of “ontology,” which is a data organisation strategy, Nextspace makes it easy to connect data from the worlds of engineering, business, design, manufacture, maintenance, finance, and asset management into coherent Digital Twins ready for visualisation, simulation analysis and optimisation.

Nextspace shares a common view with NVIDIA that open data standards are critical to Digital Twin and Omniverse developments, and that the data behind digital twins needs to remain accessible and usable for the life of the relevant asset. Buildings, highways, and cities can last for centuries. An open and ontological approach to organizing data ensures the model will not become obsolescent.

Creating a common language of“things” and related data across all systems is key to this work and so Nextspace is using ontological principles to re-introduce GUID’s (GloballyUnique ID’s) to the Omniverse USD file format. This brings real-world precision and asset tracking into the Omniverse, creating individual unique items in the virtual world and connecting them with individual unique items in originating real-world systems.

Rev Lebaredian, NVIDIA’s Vice-President Omniverse says, “GUID-enabled USD rendering combined with new AR and VR capabilities take digital twin visualisations to a new level – opening areal-world of new applications for NVIDIA’s cloud-based GPU and AI processing power. With GUID enabled traceability, we can now bring dynamic operational data from individual assets in and out of the Omniverse. Powerful real-time AI processing of organised data will enable breakthrough complex real-time digital twin simulations. Almost instant pattern recognition across federated assets will predict and prevent operational failures and help optimise systems and processes. The ability to process millions of simulations will determine potential outcomes and recommend optimum actions.

“Data interoperability remains the obstacle at the front of any digital twin or real-world artificial intelligence challenge. Where most companies focus on imaging glorious virtual cities, we saw Nextspace tackling the unglamourous but essential job of laying virtual plumbing systems underneath the streets of the Omniverse.”

Rev continues, “This important capability was on our roadmap, but as Nextspace were already doing it in the right way, it simply makes more sense to partner. We’re thrilled to simultaneously become an investor in Nextspace and welcome them to the Omniverse ecosystem.”

Mark Thomas is pleased with progress and says that “We are excited and privileged to work closely to provide the data interoperability but it’s NVIDIA’s ecosystem partners who will create the digital twins on the platform. They need to be able to create a fit-for-purpose Digital twin built on a data model that is futureproofed for the entire lifecycle of any real-world asset.

“The first step is always to identify the things that really matter based on the real-world outcomes you’re looking to achieve. Once this ontology is clear, you can use that insight to create a unified model from different data schemas without impacting those data sources. They can stay in their current form and no software needs to be installed. This also means our platform avoids the trap of multiple organizations having to debate and agree common data standards before any data work can proceed. We can account for multiple data standards, with the flexibility to evolve those standards overtime.”

Nextspace’s data interoperability platform is available now - an “omniportal” for asset, business, engineering, design, manufacturing, and finance data to be brought into the Omniverse.