Work with NVIDIA Omniverse using Microsoft Teams and Azure

Watching NVIDIA GTC event yesterday brought up interesting news and information. NVIDIA GTC is The Conference for the Era of AI and the Metaverse. Omniverse has been very strong with Industrial Metaverse and strong supporter for standardized Metaverse using Universal Scene Description (USD). With GTC announcements it is only strengthening its position on the field. And since you can not build the Metaverse alone, partnering and collaboration is very important. Yesterday NVIDIA announced in their keynote they will partner with Microsoft, enabling new capabilities to work together.

NVIDIA and Microsoft are integrating Omniverse into Microsoft productivity suite, starting with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive. I really loved how they use Microsoft Teams meeting Live Share (collaborative apps) to bring Omniverse directly to Teams meeting stage, with co-authoring capabilities. This allows people collaborate and meet in Microsoft Teams and use Omniverse during the meeting. They didn’t reveal how SharePoint and OneDrive will be integrated, so we can expect more news on those.

Let us take a look at what was shown on Keynote. In a Teams meeting you can see Omniverse application added to the meeting. After logging in, you choose the server and USD file.

Then it looks like that people can have different views for the Omniverse and they have option to select one to the meeting stage – for Live Share.

In this view the USD-model has been shared to everyone in the meeting. They all have a shared view.

When they do edit of the model, it is shown on the stage as well. We can see that robot in there is being moved.

And Omniverse Live Share keeps everyone up to date when robots and objects are moved, or new objects are added. In this case they made room to add one more robot to the assembly line.

With this, Omniverse takes a step forward with Industrial Metaverse, making it possible to work and collaborate on 3D scene and world. You can see this in action at GTC Keynote.

And partnering does not stop there. Omniverse can be powered by Microsoft Azure cloud in the future (second half of 2023) – allowing Microsoft 365 and Azure users have their own Omniverse in their Microsoft Azure.

It will be possible to connect Microsoft Azure IoT and Digital Twins to Omniverse, so you can use Azure IoT and Omniverse together, and I suspect that list can also include Azure Digital Twins.

There are several very interesting sessions in the GTC event. I recommend signing up and taking a look!