Check out NVIDIA’s Omniverse announcements from GTC 2024
NVIDIA’s keynote from GTC 2024 showed ray traced visuals from an Oniverse-developed car configurator being streamed to an Apple Vision Pro VR headset in real time.
NVIDIA has announced that Omniverse Cloud, the suite of cloud services built around its Omniverse design collaboration platform, will be available as APIs.
Five new Omniverse Cloud APIs will enable developers to integrate core Omniverse technologies directly into their own software and services: for example, to use Omniverse’s RTX Renderer to generate ray traced visualizations of data in USD format.
The new APIs were one of a number of announcements relating to Omniverse made at GTC 2024, NVIDIA’a latest GPU technology conference.
NVIDIA also showed a demo of ray traced visuals being streamed in real time from an Omniverse-developed app to Apple’s new Vision Pro VR headset.
Five new cloud APIs let devs integrate core Omniverse tech in their own software
Announced in 2022, Omniverse Cloud is a set of cloud services built around Omniverse, NVIDIA’s design collaboration platform.
Initial offerings included the option to stream the viewport output of native Omniverse apps like USD Composer and USD Presenter from the cloud to users’ devices.
The new APIs will enable developers to integrate core Omniverse technologies into their own products, particularly for manipulating data in USD format, around which Omniverse is built – for example, to use Omniverse’s RTX Renderer to visualize USD assets.
The are five new Omniverse Cloud APIs:
● USD Render — generates fully ray-traced RTX renders of OpenUSD data.
● USD Write — lets users modify and interact with OpenUSD data.
● USD Query — enables scene queries and interactive scenarios.
● USD Notify — tracks USD changes and provides updates.
● Omniverse Channel — connects users and tools to enable collaboration across scenes.
Although the APIs could be used in entertainment or visualization products, all of the early adopters cited by NVIDIA come from other industry sectors.
They include Dassault Systèmes, which plans to use the APIs in its 3DEXCITE applications for industrial content creation, and construction and geospatial tech firm Trimble, which plans to create “interactive Omniverse RTX viewers” with Trimble model data.
Other early use cases include Product Lifecycle Management and industrial digital twins.
Novel ‘hybrid rendering’ workflow streams ray traced visuals to Vision Pro headsets
In addition, NVIDIA showed ray traced visuals being streamed from an Omniverse-developed app to Apple’s high-end Vision Pro VR headset in real time at “full fidelity”.
The prerecorded demo showed a designer wearing the Vision Pro receiving visuals from a car configurator developed by CGI firm Katana Studio on the Omniverse platform.
The process used a novel hybrid rendering workflow, combining local rendering on the Vision Pro with cloud rendering on NVIDIA;s Graphics Delivery Network.
NVIDIA pitches it as an example of how Omniverse could be used with the Vision Pro to “deliver high-fidelity visuals without compromising … massive, engineering fidelity datasets”.
Technical details and release date
Omniverse Cloud APIs will be offered “later this year” on Microsoft Azure as self-hosted APIs on NVIDIA A10 GPUs or as managed services deployed on NVIDIA OVX systems.
You can find FAQs for Omniverse Cloud, including pricing info, on NVIDIA’s website.
Read NVIDIA’s announcement of its new Omniverse Cloud APIs
Read more about connecting Omniverse to the Apple Vision Pro
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