In Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality News
April 13, 2021 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, an infrastructure engineering software company, has announced that it is developing applications using the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for photorealistic, real-time visualization and simulation of digital twins of massive-scale industrial and civil infrastructure projects.
NVIDIA Omniverse is an open platform for virtual collaboration and physically accurate simulation. Based on NVIDIA RTX technology, it leverages the ‘Universal Scene Description’ common interchange format for real-time 3D visualization and simulation that was originally developed by Pixar to simplify entertainment industry workflows and is now being adopted in other industries including architecture, construction, and engineering, and digital factories.
Bentley Systems has extended its Bentley iTwin platform to integrate with NVIDIA Omniverse to provide a graphics pipeline for AI-enhanced, real-time visualization, and simulation of infrastructure digital twins. According to the company, the integration will allow engineering-grade, millimeter-accurate digital content to be visualized with photorealistic lighting and environmental effects on multiple devices including web browsers, workstations, tablets, and virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets from anywhere in the world.
Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley said: “Visualization and simulation underpin many of the use cases for infrastructure digital twins. The collaboration of Bentley iTwin and NVIDIA Omniverse is delivering real-time, immersive 3D/4D experiences that will enable true-to-reality, physics-based simulation of even the largest and most complex infrastructure assets. GPU-computing is transforming the world of engineering and construction and promises to unleash the potential of AI for simulation and advanced analytics in infrastructure digital twins.”
Bentley iTwin is an open, scalable cloud platform that allows for the creation, visualization, and analysis of digital twins of infrastructure assets. The platform can be used to incorporate engineering data, reality data, IoT data, and other associated data and align it with a living digital twin.
As a result, the integration of the capabilities of the Bentley iTwin platform and NVIDIA Omniverse will enable users to virtually explore massive industrial plants and offshore structures as if they are walking through the infrastructure in real time, for purposes such as wayfinding and safety route optimization.
“Modern infrastructure are magnificent feats of engineering. NVIDIA and Bentley share a vision of physically based digital twins – so accurate and realistically simulated that they will revolutionize everything from infrastructure design to operations,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Omniverse was built precisely to realize this vision – to create shared virtual worlds that are simulated with physical and photo realism. We are delighted Bentley is developing applications for infrastructure digital twins on NVIDIA Omniverse.”
For more information on Bentley Systems and its software solutions for infrastructure digital twins, please visit the company’s website.
Image credit: Houston Waterworks Team (a Joint Venture of Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. and CDM Constructors, Inc.)
About the author
Sam Sprigg
Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix. With a background in research and report writing, he has been covering XR industry news for the past seven years.
