Bentley iTwin integrates with NVDIA Omniverse

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.

The integration allows engineering-grade, millimeter-accurate digital content to be visualized with photorealistic lighting and environmental effects on multiple devices and VR and AR headsets anywhere.

Bentley iTwin is an open, scalable cloud platform that enables engineering firms and owner-operators to create, visualize, and analyze digital twins of infrastructure assets. 

Digital information managers use it to incorporate engineering data created by diverse design tools into a living digital twin and align it with reality data, IoT data, and other associated data without disrupting their current tools or processes.

Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley said visualization and simulation underpin many of the use cases for infrastructure digital twins. 

He said the collaboration will enable real, physics-based simulation of even the largest and most complex infrastructure assets. 

"GPU-computing is transforming the world of engineering and construction and promises to unleash the potential of AI for simulation and advanced analytics in infrastructure digital twins," he said.

"Modern infrastructure are magnificent feats of engineering. NVIDIA and Bentley share a vision of physically based digital twins – so accurate and realistically simulated that they will revolutionize everything from infrastructure design to operations," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. 

"NVIDIA Omniverse was built precisely to realize this vision – to create shared virtual worlds that are simulated with physical and photo realism. We are delighted Bentley is developing applications for infrastructure digital twins on NVIDIA Omniverse.”

The combination of the Bentley iTwin platform and NVIDIA Omniverse provides an unmatched, high-performance user experience at a scale that had previously not been possible.

The integration enables users to virtually explore massive industrial plants and offshore structures as if they are walking through the infrastructure in real time, for purposes such as navigation and safety route optimization.

"The industry is moving in a positive direction toward more automated and sophisticated tools that improve client outcomes," said Donna DeMarco, plant information modeling at Jacobs. "Jacobs is proud to partner with Bentley in leveraging tools like iTwin linked with NVIDIA Omniverse to achieve strong results for our clients."

Bentley Systems recently bought INRO Software, which specialises in multimodal transportation planning, traffic simulation, and mobility visualization software (click here). 

Last month it sealed a definitive agreement to buy Seequent, a leader in software for geological and geophysical modeling, geotechnical stability, and cloud services for geodata management, for $900 million (click here).