Back in the summer of 2022, Siemens and NVIDIA announced an expansion of their existing partnership, this piece centered around the industrial metaverse. The collaboration marked the origin of the connection between Siemens’ Xcelerator platform and NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, enabling physics-based digital twins that incorporate real-time artificial intelligence. This partnership has been going strong since then as the industrial metaverse continues to gain momentum, and this week at NVIDIA’s GTC event a “deepening” of the collaboration was announced.
With this newest stage of collaboration between the two companies, newly announced Omniverse Cloud APIs from NVIDIA power “immersive visualization” within the Xcelerator platform, with generative AI being leveraged to streamline complex workflows. In the announcement, Siemens indicated that they will release a new product later this year for their Teamcenter X software which will “provide engineering teams with the ability to create an ultra-intuitive, photorealistic, real-time, and physics-based digital twin that eliminates workflow waste and errors.”
The companies promise that this deepened collaboration and the integration of generative AI into these workflows will make some of the most complex engineering tasks significantly simpler, saying tasks that previously took days can be completed in mere hours. For example, adjusting details like material definitions and lighting environments can be done using generative AI thanks to the Omniverse APIs, allowing engineers to easily and quickly contextualize their designs in real-world environments.
Although the results of this collaboration won’t be realized until later this year, Siemens and NVIDIA have demonstrated how this technology works in practical terms with the help of ship manufacturer HD Hyundai. They develop very complicated ships powered by ammonia and hydrogen which can include over seven million discrete parts, leading to an extremely complex design process that requires massive datasets and accurate contextualization. They foresee plenty of benefits from this collaboration with NVIDIA and Siemens.
"We have long trusted Siemens Teamcenter for product lifecycle management. Based on this trust and through this new collaboration, we will be able to visualize and interact with the digital twin of ships while utilizing generative AI to create objects and HDR backgrounds for better understanding of projects in context. This will be beneficial in many ways, as it will reduce errors, improve customer experience, and also save time and cost," said Taejin Lee, Chief Information Officer & Chief Digital Officer, HD Hyundai, in a statement.
As noted above, the industrial metaverse has been growing in momentum over recent years, in large part due to work done by these two companies in the area. The news coming out of GTC highlights that major developments are still coming to this relatively nascent idea, and adding generative AI to these workflows is one of those major developments. Engineering and manufacturing projects are only going to become more complex as new technology is integrated into nearly everything we use, and more stakeholders are going to be involved as well. Being able to streamline these workflows and make it easier to contextualize designs in real-world conditions will be crucial in bringing everybody under a given umbrella into the fold.
"We will revolutionize how products and experiences are designed, manufactured and serviced. On the path to the industrial metaverse, this next generation of industrial software enables customers to experience products as they would in the real world: in context, in stunning realism and – in the future – interact with them through natural language input," said Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG, in a statement. "In collaboration with NVIDIA, we will bring accelerated computing, generative AI, and Omniverse integration across the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio."
"Omniverse and generative AI are driving massive transformation for industrial enterprises," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, in a statement. "Siemens is bringing NVIDIA platforms to their customers and opening new opportunities for industry leaders to build the next wave of AI-enabled digital twins at every scale."
