AECCafe Voice 
Susan Smith
Susan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More » AECCafe Voice Industry Predictions for 2022 – Part 1January 14th, 2022 by Susan Smith
At the heart of content creation are the machines that we run programs on. On the cutting edge as usual, NVIDIA presented at CES a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, bringing with them a plethora of new developments. Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s GeForce business, announced more than 160 thin-and-light laptops using RTX 30 Series GPUs in a smorgasbord of mobile designs.  Jeff Fisher, senior vice president of NVIDIA’s GeForce business
Laptops with the new GPUs will be available starting Feb. 1. They bring a fourth generation of Max-Q Technologies, a systems design approach that enables the thinnest, lightest, quietest gaming laptops. The latest Max-Q applies AI to optimally balance GPU/CPU power use, battery discharge, image quality and frame rates. Laptops running it can provide up to 70 percent more battery life while delivering more performance.
3D Virtual Worlds The AEC industry has looked to the tools used by professionals building virtual worlds for some time now. Fisher said tools transform the workflows of the 45 million professionals who create virtual worlds, creating games, movies and more. The building of 3D virtual worlds has long been the province of NVIDIA but now their NVIDIA Omniverse platform shows great promise beyond the entertainment industry. NVIDIA Omniverse, the platform for artists to collaborate and accelerate 3D work, remains free and is now generally available for GeForce and NVIDIA RTX Studio creators. According to company materials, Omniverse uses Pixar’s open-standard Universal Scene Description (USD) to connect tools from more than 40 software development partners into a single 3D design platform. That lets creators across the globe collaborate in Omniverse on shared 3D workflows. “This is the future of 3D content creation and how virtual worlds will be built,” Fisher said. He detailed new capabilities in Omniverse, including:
Additionally, NVIDIA has upgraded NVIDIA Canvas, their Studio app that converts brushstrokes into photorealistic images. Available free to download here, it now supports 4x the resolution and new materials like flowers and bushes thanks to the efforts of NVIDIA researchers who developed GauGAN2. It’s part of NVIDIA Studio’s broad and deep software stack, said Fisher, which accelerates more than 200 of the industry’s top creative applications. Would you say this is a look at the future or “future-proofing?” Certainly when seeking to find out how AI is being applied practically, here is a place to look. Updates to Omniverse and Digital Twins
The biggest breakthrough here is being able to predict and simulate climate change with what NVIDIA is calling Earth Two, the digital twin of the earth. The portal of Omniverse is USD, Universal Scene Description – essentially a digital wormhole that connects people and computers to Omniverse, and for one Omniverse world to connect to another. USD is to Omniverse what HTML is to websites. Omniverse is futuristic. Omniverse can connect design worlds – things created in the Adobe world can be connected to those in the Autodesk world through Omniverse – enabling designers to collaborate in a shared space. Companies can build virtual factories and operate them with virtual robots in Omniverse. The virtual factories and robots are the digital twins of their physical replica. The physical version is the replica of the digital since they are produced from the digital original. Omniverse digital twins are where we will design, train, and continuously monitor robotic buildings, factories, warehouses, and cars of the future generation for AI, or distributed computing. Omniverse AR streams graphics to phones or AR glasses. Omniverse VR will be billed as the world’s first full-frame interactive ray-traced VR. The latest update to Omniverse includes the following: Showroom – an Omniverse App of demos and samples that showcases core Omniverse technology – graphics, physics, materials, and AI. Farm – a systems layer that orchestrates the processing of batch jobs across multiple systems; workstations, servers, bare-metal or virtualized. Farm can be used for batch rendering, synthetic data generation for AI, or distributed computing. Omniverse AR streams graphics to phones or AR glasses. NVIDIA will build a digital twin to simulate and predict climate change. The new supercomputer will be E-2. Earth Two – the digital twin of Earth, will run Modulus-created AI physics, at Million-X speeds, in Omniverse. The presentation of NVIDIA’s blisteringly fast graphics cards, laptops and other hardware takes on a greater vision with the ability to use a digital twin for working on climate change employing AI, which probably will extend to other real-world applications. “We are at the dawn of the next digital frontier. Interconnected 3D virtual worlds … with shops, homes, people, robots, factories, museums … will be built by an expanding number of creators, collaborating across the globe,” Fisher said. Tags: 3D, AEC, architects, architecture, artificial intelligence, Autodesk, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, engineers, reality capture, visualization Categories: 3D, AEC, AECCafe, apps, architecture, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, collaboration, construction, engineering, infrastructure, simulation, traffic simulation, virtual reality, visualization |
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Omniverse is a very different than a game engine – it is designed to be data center scale. This means that it is not just capable of creating 3D virtual worlds for gaming, but also for designing the real world of AEC.
