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The basic idea behind the concept of digital twins is to help software model aspects of the physical world.
Fortune Business Insights predicts that the digital twin technology and services market will generate an estimated $ 8.9 billion in revenue in 2022 and grow to $ 96 billion by 2029.
Industrial technology giant Siemens has long modeled various elements of the real world with software and is now aiming to advance the approach that enables the industrial metaverse. To support that effort, Siemens today elaborated on its extended partnership with Nvidia to enable artificial intelligence (AI) digital twin capabilities.
This partnership will integrate Siemens’ industrial design and development technologies with the Nvidia Omniverse platform, enabling users to create photo-realistic virtual simulations.
Tony Hemmelgarn, President and Chief Executive Officer of Siemens, said in a press briefing:
Hemmelgarn said the combination of Siemens technology and Nvidia Omniverse will enable industrial organizations to make faster decisions.
One area where Nvidia Omniverse and Siemens can help accelerate the decision-making process of industrial enterprises is the elimination of physical prototypes. Hemmelgarn said in the past, automakers had to create expensive prototypes to develop new vehicles.
In recent years there has been a move towards virtualization of automotive design, which usually involves the use of very specific technologies that are performed in specific locations called “cave”.
Hemmelgarn said Nvidia Omniverse allows car vendors to open up the ability to visualize new designs to a larger audience instead of needing a cave. Omniverse does not require the caves to run in many different locations, allowing manufacturers to collaborate more quickly with industrial efforts.
“Siemens is number one in industrial automation and industrial software, and this leadership position enables us to provide our customers with the most accurate and complete digital twins,” says Hemmelgarn. “But with Nvidia, we can leverage AI capabilities to collaborate on this industrial metaverse that takes manufacturing and industrial automation processes to a more realistic level.”
Nvidia is familiar with partnerships and is actively working with vendors across multiple sectors. Rev. Lever LedianNvidia’s vice president of omniverse and simulation technology, commented at a press conference that he was particularly excited about the Siemens partnership.
“Siemens excels at the crossroads of information technology and operational technology, but that’s what we don’t do,” says Lebaredian. “These combinations are really unique, especially in the realm of AI, because things that no one else can do are done in real time.”
Photorealism is the key to bringing digital twins to life
Hemmelgarn said the idea of a digital twin is not a new concept, but it has changed in recent years. In his view, what has changed with digital twin technology is the comprehensive nature of the data it embraces and provides.
“The value of a digital twin is how exactly the virtual world can represent the physical world,” says Hemmelgarn.
Siemens was building its own digital twin, but Nvidia’s Omniverse took the concept to another level thanks to the photorealism of the images. For Hemmelgarn, integration with Nvidia is to make digital twins with real-time capabilities more realistic.
According to Lebaredian, the idea of Metaverse photorealism should not be driven to superficial things like entertainment. In the modern age of AI, we have realized that photorealism is important for serious applications.
“One thing that is clear to us is that we need to provide data in order to build and create an AI model, which is essentially an encoding of the experience of the world around us. “Lebaredian said. “The only way to create a truly intelligent AI is to first create data that exactly matches the real world, most of which is what the world looks like.”