Bentley Systems, a leading infrastructure engineering software company, has revealed how infrastructure organizations across the globe are harnessing the power of LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse to create compelling visualizations and project deliverables with unprecedented speed and quality. This solution enables infrastructure engineering companies to make better-informed decisions and win more projects. LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse is the first engineering software application in the market that is built on Omniverse, a platform for creating and operating industrial metaverse applications. The integration of NVIDIA Omniverse and Bentley iTwin enables real-time, immersive 3D/4D experiences to enhance the visualization and simulation of infrastructure digital twins.
The combined capabilities are delivering new possibilities and incredible results for some of the world’s largest and most complex infrastructure projects. According to Brigantium Engineering, an engineering and consulting services contractor working on the ITER project in southern France, where 35 nations are collaborating to build the world’s largest tokamak and the first fusion device to produce net positive energy output across the plasma, LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse helped the company to overcome language and communication barriers. The software provided an interactive 4D model that was intuitively understood by everyone, vastly improving and streamlining communication. Brigantium expects that this increase in user engagement and improved feedback will result in profoundly improved cross-departmental communications, quicker execution times, reduced errors, and less lost time, amounting to overall team efficiency gains of up to 80%.
LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse is also bringing innovation to the Tuas Water Reclamation Plant (TWRP) being built by PUB, Singapore’s National Water Agency. The TWRP is a one-of-a-kind, multidiscipline mega project to build a treatment facility for industrial and household wastewater. A project of this scope and complexity presents major challenges in coordination and communication across 16 different contractors on designs and construction representing 3,500 separate BIM models. By leveraging the iTwin federated model for visualization, LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse enables rapid change propagation that simplifies visualization workflows by linking directly to a single federated infrastructure digital twin so when changes occur, they are synchronized automatically, which allows the project stakeholders to review safety, quality, and design changes.
While Brigantium and PUB are benefiting from improved communication and collaboration, engineering professional services firm WSP finds LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse and the iTwin Platform instrumental for winning new projects and maintaining stakeholder engagement. WSP is utilizing LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse to produce compelling visualizations for the multibillion-dollar I-5 Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project between Oregon and Washington in the United States. The existing Interstate Bridge serves as a vital trade route for regional, national, and international economies, but the aging infrastructure is inadequate for modern traffic and is also at risk of collapse in the event of a major earthquake. Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) and Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) are supporting the use of a digital twin developed on the iTwin Platform throughout the full program cycle, from public outreach with conceptual design, through detailed design, into construction, and eventually for continuous operations and asset management.
One of the many advantages of LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse is that it enables WSP to sync change sets and seamlessly and rapidly generate updated visualizations without time-consuming imports and exports. These are only the first of many success stories likely to come from the now public availability of LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse. The combination of iTwin and NVIDIA Omniverse provides an unmatched, high-performance user experience for infrastructure organizations at a scale that has previously not been possible. ProjectWise, powered by iTwin, leverages Bentley’s infrastructure schemas to semantically align design file data across multiple disciplines, mapping the information to a common schema that is open and extensible.
Although the use of project visualizations during work-in-progress can be time-consuming, LumenRT for NVIDIA Omniverse has made it easy for companies such as Hatch Ltd, another early adopter, to streamline the creation of visualizations of various parts of the model at different stages and tell a compelling story much more quickly, making visualizations much more effective to employ throughout projects. The scale and complexity of the infrastructure projects described here demonstrate the need for AI-enhanced real-time visualizations to support the successful execution and delivery of these projects through improved communication across multiple stakeholders. iTwin and NVIDIA Omniverse help to solve these problems. NVIDIA Omniverse provides a graphics pipeline for AI-enhanced, real-time visualization, and simulation of infrastructure digital twins, allowing engineering-grade, millimeter-accurate digital content to be visualized with photorealistic lighting and environmental effects on multiple devices, including web browsers, workstations, tablets, and virtual-reality and augmented-reality devices.
