The luxury car manufacturer announced at the CES 2023 exhibition a transition to a Digital First approach in which the next production plants of its vehicles will first be produced as a digital twin in Metaverse, using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.
Nvidia also announced a variety of new capabilities for the Omniverse Enterprise platform, the availability of the Omniverse ACE avatar platform and the platform’s support for Blender.
Smart manufacturing
Mercedes-Benz (Mercedes-Benz) announced at the CES 2023 exhibition that it is taking the next step in making the production process of its vehicles digital, through the use of the NVIDIA Omniverse virtual worlds platform for the design and planning of production and assembly plants.
Through the use of Metaverse and NVIDIA AI technologies, the automaker will be able to reduce the amount of waste and energy consumption of the factories, as well as increase their quality. Mercedes-Benz’s announcement connects AI and Metaverse technologies, making the development and production process smarter and more efficient.
Manufacturing vehicles is a particularly challenging task, requiring many thousands of components and workers moving in harmony, and any problem in the supply chain or production may lead to costly delays. Also, with the release of each new model, the manufacturer must redefine the layout of the production lines in order to respond to the new design, in a process that can force the shutdown of part of the factory and the cessation of production of the existing models.
Soon, Mercedes-Benz plans to start production of a new platform for an electric vehicle produced at its plant in the city of Rauschstadt in Germany, where the A and B series, as well as the EQA and GLA models are currently produced. Without affecting current production, and thanks to the Digital-First approach, NVIDIA and Mercedes-Benz experts are starting to develop a digital production and development plan for the company’s next electric platform.
Thanks to Omniverse, the designers at Mercedes-Benz will be able to enter the digital twin of the production and assembly plant, examine it and optimize it as needed. Any required change in the factory can be evaluated, tested and verified in the digital twin quickly, and after being tested and verified – it can be implemented in the factory in the real world, to ensure the maximum efficiency, safety and ergonomics of the factory workers.
Mercedes-Benz and Nvidia are working together on the development of software-oriented vehicles, and the next generations of its vehicles will be based on the NVIDIA DRIVE Orin platform, with intelligent driving capabilities. These were tested and verified using the NVIDIA DRIVE Sim simulation platform, based on Omniverse. for further details.
NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise
Nvidia also announced at the CES 2023 exhibition a significant update to the Omniverse Enterprise platform. The new version of the platform, which is available now, brings improved and far-reaching performance for Ray Tracing and Path Tracing in real time, alongside support for the third generation of RTX technology and DLSS 3, which will result in up to a threefold improvement in performance when using RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics processors, NVIDIA L40 or NVIDIA OVX systems.
The various upgrades will make it possible to move forward a variety of uses of the platform, which include the creation of synthetic data in 3D (3D Synthetic Data Generation), the construction of customized 3D tools, the construction of layer-based work processes (Layer-Based Live Workflows) that will allow work on different layers of The files from anywhere in the world, and more.
In addition to the performance improvement, the latest update to Omniverse Enterprise brings with it a variety of new features and connectors, as part of the continued expansion of the Omniverse platform ecosystem, intended for designers, developers, artists, and engineers.
Omniverse DeepSearch – an AI-based tool that is now available and allows teams to intuitively search for information within databases of untagged 3D data through natural language understanding or using 2D objects as a reference.
Omniverse Farm – a new user interface that offers improved capabilities and performance, as well as support for Kubernetes.
Omniverse Cloud – new cloud containers (Cloud Containers) for supporting a variety of features and capabilities, including Enterprise Nucleus Server, Omniverse Replicator, Farm and Isaac Sim for AWS allow organizations greater flexibility in managing distributed teams around the world. The containers are now available through NVIDIA NGC.
Omniverse Kit SDK, Omniverse Create / View / Nucleus – The core components of Omniverse are updated with support for NVIDIA DLSS 3 and Multi-Viewport and a host of other upgrades.
Omniverse Enterprise has been adopted by a series of companies and organizations, including: Mercedes-Benz, Dentsu, Zaha Hadid Architects and more.
More announcements
The NVIDIA Omniverse platform, which enables creators, artists, animators, developers and engineers to develop metaverse applications, is expanding with support for Blender and a series of new Generative AI tools for 3D artists. Also, Nvidia revealed at CES that NVIDIA Studio series laptops will have NVIDIA Omniverse pre-installed.
Among the new or updated features you can find Omniverse Audio2Face – an artificial intelligence tool that allows you to automatically generate realistic facial expressions from an audio file; as well as Omniverse Audio2Gestore and Audio2Emotion – Generative AI tools that enable the production of 3D animation immediately, which receive a significant improvement in performance that will allow developers and creators to integrate them into their current 3D workflows.
The platform will also offer the AI ToyBox – a series of experimental tools developed by NVIDIA Research and including GET3D, an omniverse plugin for creating 3D images using 2D images.
The avatar development platform from NVIDIA, NVIDIA Omniverse ACE (AKA Avatar Cloud Engine) is now available in early access. ACE includes a suite of AI-based cloud services that allow you to build, develop and implement AI-driven avatars that can be used as virtual assistants or “digital humans” on a large scale.