Nvidia Introduces Omniverse Cloud APIs

A groundbreaking announcement was made by Nvidia at its developer conference in San Jose this week, introducing a fresh perspective on the concept of digital twins. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, revealed that the company's Omniverse Cloud will now be accessible through APIs (application programming interfaces). This development will empower customers to utilize these APIs for designing, simulating, testing, and constructing physically accurate digital twins within the industrial sector.

During the conference, Huang unveiled five APIs along with a series of customer partnerships, including Ansys, Cadence, and Siemens. The APIs encompass a range of functionalities such as USD (Universal Screen Description) Render, which facilitates the generation of fully ray-tracked RTX rendering of OpenUSD data. Additionally, USD Query enables scene queries and interactive scenarios, while USD Write allows for modification and interaction with USD data. The USD Notify API tracks changes and provides updates, and the Omniverse Channel connects users, tools, and Omniverse worlds for seamless collaboration across diverse scenes.

Developers now have the opportunity to leverage these APIs to seamlessly integrate Omniverse, Nvidia's collaborative real-time 3D graphics technology, into their existing design, automation software applications, or simulation workflows. This integration enables them to conduct thorough testing and validation of digital twins, as well as autonomous robots or vehicles. The APIs can be utilized individually or collectively, offering flexibility and customization options to developers.

Nvidia has recently entered into a partnership with Apple to introduce the Omniverse Cloud APIs to the Apple Vision Pro. This collaboration aims to enable the streaming of 3D USD scenes to Nvidia's Graphics Delivery Network (GDN) of graphics-ready data centers. A demonstration showcased a designer using Vision Pro in conjunction with Katana's car configurator application to design a car, select exterior paint and interior trim options, and seamlessly blend 3D photorealistic environments to create a physically accurate digital twin of the car, which was then streamed to Vision Pro's high-resolution display.

Rev Lebaredian, the vice president of simulation at Nvidia, expressed his enthusiasm about the collaboration, stating, "Apple Vision Pro is the first untethered device which allows for enterprise customers to realize their work without compromise." Huang further emphasized the significance of Omniverse and generative AI as foundational technologies in digitalizing the $50-trillion heavy industries market, highlighting the transformative potential of these innovations.