Siemens Begins Release of Immersive and Photorealistic, Physical AI Tech
Over the past few years at its annual user conferences, Siemens Digital Industries Software has made significant announcements around its development and real-world testing of immersive engineering technologies for its NX software and photorealistic visualization of data in its Teamcenter software. At the CES 2025 event, the company announced that these technologies are now being made widely available.
On the immersive tech front, Siemens Digital Industries Software and Sony Corporation are now delivering on the two companies’ collaboration that brings together Siemens’ NX software for product engineering with Sony’s XR head-mounted display (HMD). The XR HMD (SRH-S1) features Sony’s high-definition 1.3-type OLED microdisplays with 4K resolution for real-time, high-definition and realistic rendering of 3D objects. It also has a pair of controllers for intuitive interaction with 3D objects and precise pointing.
An early tester of this technology, Ian Briggs, founder and head of design at Briggs Automotive Company, said, “Siemens’ Immersive Engineering technology helps our designers and engineers see, design and edit parts more easily with the unique controllers, enable our customers to experience their car at human-scale before it is built, and help stakeholders from production easily collaborate with designers and engineers to validate parts before manufacturing.”
In its announcement at CES, Siemens said its NX Immersive Designer and Collaborator are available for all NX customers with the latest software updates and through licensing starting in January 2025. The HMD with the controllers is needed for both NX Immersive Designer and Collaborator and is priced at $4,750 and available for preorder, with shipping expected to begin in February 2025.
The photorealism and physical AI connection
In 2022, Automation World covered the initial announcements around Siemens’ work with Nvidia to develop industrial metaverse technology, which uses physics-based digital models from Siemens and AI-enabled, physically accurate, real-time simulations from Nvidia.
Photorealistic tech is increasingly being positioned as a critical key to implementations of physical AI — a term that you’ll likely be hearing a lot more about this year. If you’re not familiar with the term physical AI, think of it like this: generative AI (genAI), which includes ChatGPT and copilot technology, is all about enabling humans to interact with machines to get the information the human needs. Physical AI is about enabling machines or data sources to interact with other machines/data sources to get the information they need to perform tasks. Like genAI, physical AI continuously improves its capabilities based on its interactions.
At CES, Siemens Digital Industries Software announced that its new Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer now brings the Nvidia Omniverse platform and accelerated computing to Teamcenter for high-performance photorealistic visualization of large, complex datasets common in engineering and manufacturing. To enable this, Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer embeds high-performance, real-time ray tracing capabilities into Teamcenter.
According to Siemens, this “enables companies to visualize and interact with photorealistic, physics-based digital twins of their products, eliminating workflow waste and errors.”
To understand how this fits in with the vision for physical AI, consider how Nvidia describes the role of photorealism: Creating 3D worlds for physical AI simulation requires three steps — world building, labeling the world with physical attributes and making it photoreal. As Jensen Huang, founder and CEO at Nvidia, explained, “Physical AI will revolutionize the $50 trillion manufacturing and logistics industries. Everything that moves — from cars and trucks to factories and warehouses — will be robotic and embodied by AI.”
Essentially, the tech companies see these photorealistic worlds — created using real-time, real-world data — as being the training ground for autonomous, physical AI-driven technologies before deploying them in the real world. Though it’s clearly more advanced than the virtual commissioning of a piece of industrial equipment, this vision for physical AI trained on photorealistic real-world data is aimed at creating the same outcome — a viable technology that can operate in the real world upon deployment because it’s been trained extensively on real-world data.
For manufacturers wondering about the upside of using photorealism tech for digital twins, Siemens listed these key benefits:
- Enhanced realism provides greater insights and a deeper understanding of product designs.
- Adding photorealism helps eliminate the need for expensive physical prototypes and separate virtual environments, significantly reducing costs and accelerating time-to-market.
- Live 3D data interoperability and integration means that product information is always synchronized, reducing errors and data discrepancies.
