Lori Hufford, Bentley Systems vice president of engineering collaboration, recently spoke about the metaverse and its potential uses for infrastructure design at NVIDIA’s GTC developer conference March 23, offering some insights on where its potential lies.
Hufford said that while the metaverse is still a work in progress, the standards needed for deploying it in infrastructure projects are already emerging. 3D, geospatially located immersive models updated in real time by team members and sensors—with no loss of data fidelity and able to access interoperable content from multiple stakeholders—are all requirements for a metaverse digital twin workflow, Hufford said.
Bentley’s LumenRT was the first engineering application built on NVIDIA Omniverse, a platform for building shared metaverse environments for complex models. Brigantium Engineering used LumenRT on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in France, with Oculus VR headsets to view federated models from 35 countries and even more suppliers.
Richard Kerris, vice president of the Omniverse platform at NVIDIA, said the company’s aim is to enhance existing workflows for infrastructure construction.
“We’re thinking more broadly on the [Omniverse] platform,” explains Hufford. “We don’t set out to replace anything that the companies are using in those workflows.”
Having engineering data in cloud-based platforms like iTwin will help the transition to immersive, metaverse design and review, Hufford said. “The underlying technology allows this to happen.”
