A new Covid-19 surge may have forced some people to skip in-person attendance of CES 2022, but it plays right into the growing excitement around metaverse, and the notion that many of us will find ourselves more often working and living in a hybrid of physical and virtual worlds.
For months, Nvidia has been cultivating its plans to enable and support this new reality, and those efforts reached a culmination of sorts this week with the news from CES 2022 that Nvidia’s Omniverse platform is now generally available as a free download for individual Nvidia Studio users of the company’s GeForce RTX and Nvidia RTX GPUs.
Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse developer platform at Nvidia, has described the platform has providing the common “connective tissue” for creating and managing virtual worlds in the same way that HTML did so for content development years ago. This week’s move from beta to general availability will put that theory to the test, although as Kerris pointed out the platform already has been downloaded by almost 100,000 users since the beta program went into effect about a year ago.
“We’re going to see a lot more content created for and consumed in virtual worlds,” Kerris said. “Decisions can be expensive if you have to make them more than once, and creating a virtual reality allows you to see what would happen. It saves a lot of time and a lot of money. Omniverse is the platform that will allow you to connect to all the leading 3D design apps and collaborate with other artists.”
Nvidia also announced some new features coming to Omniverse, including:
- Omniverse Nucleus Cloud, which Kerris described as a “one-click-to-collaborate” feature allowing individual creators in different locations to share and cooperate on designing, changing and updating large Omniverse 3D scenes without requiring massive data set transfers–similar to something like Google Docs, but for 3D scene design.
- New support for the Omniverse ecosystem from 3D marketplaces and digital asset libraries, including TurboSquid by Shutterstock, CGTrader, Sketchfab and Twinbru. The release of more Omniverse-ready assets will make 3D content creation much easier, Kerris said.
- Omniverse Machinima for RTX users working on game designs. This feature includes storyline development tools such as free characters, objects and environments from game titles like Mechwarrior 5 and Shadow Warrior 3 to speed the development of new games
- Omniverse Audio2Face, an application that uses AI to analyze audio samples and apply a “blendshape” capability that matches facial animation to the audio expressions. Kerri said this will be critical in the design of meta-humans for metaverse use cases.
The CES announcement comes less than two months after Omniverse Enterprise became available for enterprise development of digital twins and other metaverse applications for industrial use cases.
Kerris said Omniverse also now comes with “connectors” to 14 outside applications like Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, and that the platform soon will include a connector to Adobe Substance 3D Material Extension coming soon. Among new connectors and asset libraries, Nvidia Omniverse now connects to e-on software’s VUE, PlatFactory and PlantCatalog. The first application enables creation of 3D nature and landscape scenes, while PlantFactory supports creation of vegetation as small as twigs or as large as redwood trees, as well as wind animation effects. PlantCatalog has a collection of more than 120 ready-made vegetation assets.
Meanwhile, Twinbru, now accessible in Omniverse, is a “digital twin of physical fabric” provider that supplies interior and exterior furnishing fabrics for drapery, sheers, curtains and upholstery applications, offering 21,000 different fabrics and 11,000 digitized fabric twins for various architectural designs. Kerris noted that connections to assets libraries like these and support for more realistic avatar creation, as enabled through solutions like Audio2Face, are what will make metaverse realistic enough to valuable for business and entertainment uses.