One of the most exciting announcements in today’s NVIDIA GTC keynote was that NVIDIA’s Omniverse would become available as a cloud service, so creators and designers won’t even need an RTX GPU in their computers. That opens the door to new users and new use cases.
This cloud offering is made possible by using the GeForce Now streaming platform known for cloud gaming, but it can also run other types of apps, including Omniverse Create and Omniverse View.
Create is an app in which designers can perform modifications in the scene. At the same time, View is, of course, just a viewer that decision-makers use to participate in the design validation process.
Omniverse Nucleus Cloud frees the organization from installing and maintaining an Omniverse server that hosts the Nucleus Core service component. That’s the software responsible for the data synchronization between all participants.
Omniverse isn’t particularly difficult to install on a local computer, but there are security concerns that might be easier to outsource to a cloud product at the enterprise level.
From a business standpoint, I really like how an agency could “surge” its staff without having to procure expensive computers such as the workstations we’ve recently reviewed like the ASUS ProArt Studiobook 16, the Acer ConceptD 5, or the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen4.
Of course, working on a workstation is always more comfortable. After testing the GeForce Now service in the context of gaming, I can say that streaming these apps can work exceptionally well if you have an excellent Internet connection (that might be a big “if” for some).
Expect these cloud services to become even better in the future as usage models and pricing become well understood. They dramatically lower the barrier of entry and provide an on-demand solution that makes a lot of sense for many studios and designers.
To see the demo, watch the video below (jump to 1:28:37):