Attracting real-world eyeballs at NVIDIA GTC 2024, Lenovo’s new Spatial Computing Appliance incorporates the Lenovo ThinkStation PX and the Lenovo ThinkReality VRX headset.
The workstation, Lenovo’s most powerful yet, includes up to 120 CPU cores and four dual-slot GPUs while still leaving a slot available for 25GB networking, offering unprecedented content creation potential. This means the power to create content that replicates and extends the physical world, generating digital twins that can be used to model just about anything in a synergistic, collaborative environment.
Digital twins are already transforming product development in multiple ways, as Gary Radburn, NVIDIA Solutions Manager for Lenovo’s Workstation product group, explained.
“The challenges that enterprise customers face are, ‘How do we do more with less? How can we do more interactions more quickly, to get the right product out the door with a shorter time to monetization?’” he explained.
When you can iterate digitally, the resource savings are obvious, especially when working at the scale of commercial construction, for example – but only if the digital twin accurately and completely replicates all the critical aspects of the physical.
Building together in VR
“There are some great examples in architecture, when you consider the cost of actually developing a building,” Radburn reflected. “Long before you even break ground, you can model the customer’s vision inside a digital twin environment. It’s so much richer than a CAD-CAM environment – you can see how people move through the building, model the necessary HVAC systems to support them. You can even model time-of-day simulations to see how to arrange the desks so no one gets the late afternoon sun in their eyes.”
Lenovo’s collaboration with NVIDIA provides enterprises with the technologies they need to support their multi-user workflows and bring these models to life, as Greg Jones, Director of Global Business Development for XR at NVIDIA, explained. Being able to collaborate in parallel unlocks unprecedented potential.
“The connectors for widely used applications like Unreal Engine or Blender mean that everyone can work collaboratively in a dynamic digital twin, testing and making changes, instead of passively exploring it,” he explained.
By using the Lenovo Spatial Computing Appliance, which includes a ThinkStation PX and four ThinkReality VRX headsets in a single unit, over a high-speed wireless network, all four users can have their own uncompromised, virtual reality (VR)session. NVIDIA RTX professional GPUs render each user’s 3D experience and also offer the ability for the four users to collaborate in an XR experience, for example, using AutodeskVRED.
“With this USD enablement and these connectors, everyone can provide ownership of modifications in simulation and then hook that into tools and applications developed on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for a ray-traced rendering, which shows exactly the characteristics of how, for example, light interacts with matter, on a 40ft wall,” Jones described.
The combination of the ThinkStation PX with NVIDIA RTX GPUs and the fidelity of the ThinkReality VRX means you can visualize and render everything in matter and space. Users can visualize and iterate more quickly and bring products to market and monetize more rapidly too.
Training machines in infinite virtual environments
Of course, it’s not just buildings. Other digital twins reflect truly moving targets.
“We spend a lot of time at NVIDIA on advancing the autonomous vehicle space,” Jones continued. “We drive our autonomous vehicles trillions of miles in large-scale simulations to train the AIs much faster than in any physical system. We can spawn any reality to test and train their reactions in complete safety.” And thanks to the collaborative environment, they can do it in parallel, training millions of robots at one time, before that trained robot is safely deployed on the roads or in industrial manufacturing or logistics situations.
With sufficient compute – and imagination – digital twins can be used to model just about anything and at any scale, from microscopic robots to the entire city state of Singapore, which has built a digital twin to map everything from urban development to the welfare of heritage trees, fed by sensors in the trees themselves. The technology can even be used at planetary scale, such as in the case of the NVIDIA Earth-2 digital twin for modelling climate change.
The convergence of Lenovo’s innovative hardware and NVIDIA’s cutting-edge software helps power a meaningful leap forward in digital twin technology. This collaboration enhances our ability to model and interact with the physical world in unimagined ways and improves efficiency, innovation, and sustainability across multiple domains. With systems like the ThinkStation PX AI Workstation and tools and applications built on Omniverse and OpenUSD, the future of digital replication looks bright, paving the way for smarter, more connected digital environments, while preserving our precious physical one at the same time.
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