What actually is Nvidia Omniverse? In simple terms?
Mark Laurence
Technology Enthusiast with a Focus on AI Innovations and Computing Solutions at TD Synnex GCC
For those of you that are confused by Omniverse, I am going to attempt to explain it in a sentence or two.
You know how office 365 lets you work on a file with someone else at the same time, powered by the cloud, and you can see their changes in real time? Now imagine you are not restricted to use MS Word alone, you can collaborate with other users using Google Docs, Openoffice or iWork suite.
That's Omniverse , for 3D files rather than word documents.
Of course, in reality there is a lot more to it than that. However real time collaboration on its own is a big achievement!
It all started back when Pixar came up with a method for describing 3D scenes called USD - Universal Scene Description. This technology underpinned the software packages used to create famous 3D movies such as Finding Nemo 2.
USD provided Pixar with the ability to let hundreds of artists collaborate whilst making the 3D scenes for movies in a far simpler manner than previously achieved, and somewhat revolutionised the animation industry. In 2016 Pixar released this technology to the open source community and slowly other design studios and software packages for the mainstream started to adopt it. To quote Pixar:
"It is a system for encoding scalable, hierarchically organized, static and time-sampled data, for the primary purpose of interchanging and augmenting the data between cooperating digital content creation applications."
OK that's starting to sound complicated, but bear with me.
USD on its own is just a framework, a set of capabilities if you like. It requires further software on top of it to truly enable real time collaboration, especially from multiple software packages and different vendors simultaneously. Think of USD as the .doc in the Office Scenario. It takes more than a file type to enable collaboration and real time sharing, and USD is more than a file type, by their own proclamation.
Which software packages use USD? As of today Wikipedia states that the following popular 3D creation packages support USD. It is also supported by 3D game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine.
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Omniverse provides a platform for you to implement USD in a commercial, creative environment.
Essentially you can set it up in the cloud, or on premise, and due to the beauty of the internet, Omniverse will enable that important cross-application collaboration between teams as close together or as disparate as you would like.
You can have a guy in Japan working on the lighting in a scene while a guy in France works on a texture in the same scene, and each can view the changes in real time.
The additional features within the Omniverse interface allow a user to view, edit and even create USD scenes from scratch, albeit not as efficiently as in one of the aforementioned packages. You can also download the various connectors for the popular packages and game engines to connect directly to Omniverse, and enable that all important collaboration. Omniverse acts as a hub for other Omniverse applications and as a browser for the Omniverse USD models.
The Omniverse Interface "Exchange" or App Store.
Real time viewing of a 3D scene, in different software packages, and viewing live real time changes across them is now a reality.
Omniverse will also enable all sorts of virtual objects, scenes and even worlds to be created more efficiently across teams of developers with a variety of software packages, and it can only be a good thing. You can even try the open beta free just now, but of course if you wish to implement in a commercial environment you will need Omniverse licenses. You know who to call. Of course you will also need at least an Nvidia RTX GPU to run Omniverse, and scaled up infrastructure if it is on a commercial scale.
To end with a one liner from a YouTube video by Gamefromscratch:
Think of Omniverse as the glue that sticks USD and the 3D creative worlds together.