Nvidia Fashions Industrial-Strength Metaverse-As-A-Service

Nvidia, having announced an unexpected entry into the field of metaverse-enabling software, brings a surprising focus on industrial applications to an emerging technology that has largely been garnering attention for novel consumer services, gaming and marketing.

With a significant revenue windfall from selling its graphics chips to Ethereum
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miners come and gone, the chipmaker now sees an opportunity for building out immersive manufacturing-design capabilities based on its computing systems into an industrial-oriented metaverse.

CEO Jensen Huang describes this as a “3D extension of the internet.” That may be at odds with the outlook for a decentralized, blockchain-based metaverse that shifts away from the current corporate-dominated model, a path championed by enthusiasts of so-called web3 technologies.

“A lot of people think that—when you say “metaverse,” they imagine putting on VR headsets, but it’s obviously not just that,” Huang told technology news publication VentureBeat. “You can do that, but you can also enjoy it in 2D. One of my favorite ways of enjoying the metaverse is a whole bunch of robots in the metaverse doing work and communicating with robots that are outside in the physical world,” he added. “The physical world and the metaverse can be connected in a lot of different ways. It doesn’t just have to be humans. It can be machine to machine.”

Nvidia’s industrial focus stands in contrast to that of Meta–the company that liked the thought of social media combining with the metaverse so much it changed its name–which signed up with partners like Microsoft
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and Accenture
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to develop office-related functionality after a year in which its more leisurely approach flopped.

In fact, the glamorous 3D spaces where human avatars can shop, party and work are struggling to attract users. Most visitors to Meta’s Horizon Worlds generally don’t return after the first month, and the user base has been steadily declining since the spring, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report. Decentraland
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a blockchain-based metaverse valued at $1 billion, where users can buy plots of virtual land, had been reported by CoinDesk to have a measly 38 daily active users, though the company disputed the claim last week, dear the number is 8,000.

Meanwhile, Nvidia is rolling out simulations for developing, testing and managing artificial-intelligence-based robots (Isaac Sim) and autonomous vehicles (DRIVE).
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Sims). The platforms are part of the company’s suite of cloud services purpose-built for metaverse applications called Omniverse Cloud. Unveiled at Nvidia’s annual GPU Technology Conference (known as GTC) last month, it is the company’s first software-and infrastructure-as-a-service offering, which is already being used by the likes of Siemens, Europe’s largest industrial manufacturer, and Croatian luxury carmaker Rimac.

“We’ve always understood from the beginning that we’re not just a chip company,” says Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology at Nvidia. “Software, the understanding of the whole stack has been critical to the type of computing we do. Accelerated computing is all about vertical integration of the technology from chips all the way up to applications.”

While metaverse-enabling software is a relatively new market for the Santa Clara, California-based tech giant, its 3D collaborative tools under the Omniverse umbrella, based on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description standard, have attracted over 200,000 individual users and more than 700 companies since launch in 2019. In addition, they run on chips and hardware Nvidia is most famous for, including NVIDIA
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OVX, a computing system specifically designed to power large-scale digital twin simulations, which replicates real-world spaces in a metaverse environment.

“There’s already plenty of understanding or at least discussion and enthusiasm around building a metaverse that has gaming and social kinds of experiences. There’s very little public discourse about how the metaverse will help industries,” Lebaredian says. That doesn’t mean that our technology stack isn’t applicable to things outside of the industrial use cases. It’s just where our focus is,” he adds.

The company has identified the potential market for Omniverse enterprise software at $150 billion. Lebaran told Forbes the company has “hundreds of engineers” working on the Omniverse and invested “many hundreds of millions of dollars into it,” but he declined to provide the specifics. “Our investment has been growing. This is a long-term play. We’re going to be doing this for decades,” said the executive.

As for most companies jumping on the metaverse bandwagon, it may take a while for Nvidia to realize a return on these investments. Matt Bryson, senior vice president of equity research at Wedbush, says Nvidia’s vision is “compelling” but “significant Omniverse use cases and related revenues remain some ways out.”

Still, Lebaredian believes Nvidia has a role to play in whatever vision of the metaverse will prevail—be it enterprise-controlled applications or decentralized havens of web3. “History has shown that usually it’s not one or the other. We’re going to see some combination of these things,” he says. “I think our computers will be used regardless of which path you go from here.”