April 28, 2021

Interview: Bentley Systems and NVIDIA share a powerful vision for infrastructure digital twins

In addition to the much-discussed release of the NVIDIA Omniverse 3D development platform, an additional announcement from Bentley Systems revealed just how far NVIDIA is planning to go in pursuit of digital twins.

“We have a very common vision of where [digital twins]are going. I’m amazed at how much work gets done with Bentley Tools and the complexity and the size of the projects. When we look at that and then we see it in Omniverse, we’re just excited about it – we see the world in the same way.” -Richard Kerris, NVIDIA

In addition to the much-discussed release of the NVIDIA Omniverse 3D development platform, an additional announcement from Bentley Systems revealed just how far NVIDIA is planning to go in pursuit of digital twins.

As part of the Omniverse-related announcements at GTC, Bentley Systems, shared that they would be bringing infrastructure digital twins to NVIDIA Omniverse. Bentley will be the first to harness real-time rendering, AI and simulation capabilities of NVIDIA Omniverse, and will continue to build upon the platform going forward. The shared vision of a “digital twin” was apparent from CEO Jensen Huang’s comments in the keynote, only a few minutes into his talk.

“[Bentley] has a platform called iTwin for digital twins – an exciting strategy to use the 3D models after construction to monitor and optimize the performance throughout its life. We’re super excited to partner with Bentley, to create infrastructure digital twins and Omniverse, Bentley is the first third-party company to be developing a suite of applications on the omniverse platform. This is just an awesome use of Omniverse, a great example of digital twins and Bentley is the perfect partner.”

The nature of the partnership is that Bentley Systems has extended the 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. This integration allows 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 and augmented reality headsets from anywhere in the world.

To find out more about this partnership, SPAR 3D editor Carla Lauter sat down with Richard Kerris, GM of Omniverse of NVIDIA and Lori Hufford VP of Applications Integration at Bentley Systems to discuss how Bentley Systems will plan to bring their digital twins expertise to NVIDIA Omniverse.

“Omniverse allows for infrastructure digital twins to be visualized with photo-realistic lighting and environmental effects… it allows for that to happen on multiple devices, including web browsers and workstations tablets, virtual reality, augmented reality headsets, from really anywhere in the world. So the possibilities that it opens are super exciting.” –Lori Hufford, Bentley Systems

Watch the full interview (12 minutes) below:

 

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