Nvidia recently announced an effort to expand industrial metaverse applications, and a major element in that effort will be the company’s partnership with Nextspace, a self-described metaverse “plumbing” firm providing cloud-based platform-as-a-service solutions to support federation of realistic, industrial digital twins in Nvidia’s Omniverse environment, and greater interoperability between digital twins.
Nextspace COO Paul Shale told Fierce Electronics by email that the company, which showed off its technology at Nvidia’s GTC Spring conference earlier this year, will help digital twins created using Nvidia’s Omniverse platform interoperable with other digital twin environments, which could spur more rapid growth in digital twins spanning global companies and industry ecosystems.
Nextspace’s technology will connect and structure the data involved to help teams managing digital twins make better, more informed decisions. The company’s data interoperability platform harmonizes the different data types that matter most,
enabling meaningful and accurate visualization, optimization, simulation, and prediction of outcomes.
“We don’t change the structure of any source data, but map attributes between source data and the platform universal schema depending on what’s most important to the purpose of the twin,” Shale said. “This universal schema is adaptable so it can adopt new data standards, technologies and data types over time (which we believe makes the platform future-proofed).”
The company then applies a globally unique identifier system to help recognize how different data files relate to the same real-world element. “This data-first approach is the framework that allows us to connect two different digital twins created on different platforms,” Shale explained.
Nextspace’s platform architecture has attracted acclaim from digital twin experts including Michael Grieves, a founder of the digital twin movement and Chief Scientist at the Digital Twin Institute, who commented, “I like Nextspace a lot from an architectural standpoint. The platform is positioned to address digital twin interoperability and is also indicative that digital twins are evolving into the next stage – platforms.”
Initially, Nvidia and Nextspace will direct their industrial digital twin efforts at “plant and process” environments in industries like petroleum, natural gas, petrochemical, and water management. This will be followed by endeavors in infrastructure and facilities. highways, rail, airports, and urban intensification.