Nvidia’s Omniverse is already helping save the planet while Meta lags behind

In stark contrast, Chris Weasler, head of special initiatives at Meta, also speaking at MWC 2022, said the version of metaverse from his company — formerly Facebook — "isn’t going to happen overnight" and that it requires "significant advancements in network latency, symmetrical bandwidth and overall speed of networks."

Seeing Vasishta and Weasler speaking side-by-side painted a picture of one company looking to the future and another that is already seeing its version of the metaverse improve the world in tangible ways. It's a state of flux reflected by the fact that Meta recently lost users for the first time in its history, leading to it being overtaken in the list of largest companies in the U.S. by Nvidia after the social media company's value plumetted.

What is the Omniverse?

Meta's Weasler stated that "in the next 10 years, it would be amazing if we could bring a billion people onto the metaverse", driving millions of dollars for the ecosystem. The suggestion is that a lot of work is needed to fulfill the metaverse's potential. By contrast, Nvidia's Vasishta focused on the ways that the Omniverse is already helping companies such as Ericsson and BMW to simulate real processes with unprecedented accuracy, allowing them to boost productivity and innovation.

As Vasishta explained during his speech at the MWC, the Omniverse simulates the real world in photorealistic graphics, but it is "much more than a gaming engine" and it "obeys the laws of physics" precisely to allow companies to perform tests in real-time.

With Nvidia's digital twin projects, the company has created a like-for-like version of a car factory for BMW in the Omniverse, allowing it to test individual components in an almost real-life setting. As Nvidia points out in the video above, Omniverse gives BMW the ability to collaborate and simulate to improve entire plant processes as well as minute engineering details. 

Ericsson, meanwhile, has used the omniverse to test and optimize its 5G deployment, testing metrics in real-time. Ericsson has built city-scale models that are physically accurate down to the materials of the buildings, allowing them to simulate 5G signal quality across an entire city.

The next step? Nvidia is building a "digital twin" of the entire planet, called Earth-2, within the omniverse for climate modeling. "Hopefully," Vasishta said, "we will be able to take the argument out of climate change by having an accurate prediction." This immensely practical capability for Nvidia's version of the metaverse sets it apart from other companies, including Meta, which are currently still planning far ahead and touting the increased connectivity of the metaverse above all else.