Nvidia wants its first SaaS product to help power the metaverse
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Nvidia has become the latest company to start preparing for the metaverse with a newly announced Omniverse Cloud.
Announced at the recent Nvidia GTC 2022 event (opens in new tab)is the company’s first software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering designed to help developers design, publish, operate, and experience metaverse apps.
Omniverse Cloud eliminates the need for localized computing power and offers powerful capabilities such as 3D workflows, with more than 700 companies and 200,000 people already signed up.
Nvidia Omniverse Cloud
Nvidia used autonomous vehicle engineers as an example of the type of developers who will especially benefit from the new SaaS, as they can generate physically-based sensor data and simulate real-life environments to test their safety systems.
Omniverse Nucleus Cloud is the primary component that allows designers to access shared 3D data. From this, users can use Omniverse App Streaming and Omniverse View to create and review projects, and Omniverse Replicator to generate synthetic data.
Other tools include Omniverse Farm for teams that want to use multiple cloud computing instances; scalable robot simulation app Nvidia Isaac Sim; and Nvidia Drive Sim for running multisensor simulations for the development of autonomous vehicles, for example.
The Croatian hypercar company Rimac is already on board, 10% of which consists of Volkswagen subsidiary Porsche. CEO and founder Mate Rimac likens Nvidia’s metaverse offering to electric car engines that “can adapt in the blink of an eye.” He continues to explain in a press release on the company website (opens in new tab) that Omniverse Cloud’s 3D autoconfigurator experience “unlocks infinite customization possibilities without having to manually render each layer, saving time and money.”
Marketing services organization WPP is another early adopter of Omniverse Cloud. The company has already launched automotive marketing services with the SaaS to deliver custom 3D content, which according to Chief Technology Office, Stephan Pretorius, is more sustainable due to its low-emission manufacturing process.
Omniverse Farm, Omniverse Replicator, and Nvidia Isaac Sim are already available for self-service deployment on AWS with Amazon EC2 G5 instances, with A10G Tensor Core GPUs. More broadly, Omniverse Cloud will be available as Nvidia-managed services through an application-based early access program.