IT in Manufacturing


Immersive engineering for the industrial metaverse

February 2025 IT in Manufacturing

Siemens Digital Industries Software has announced that it is delivering on its next-generation immersive engineering roadmap in collaboration with Sony Corporation. This brings together Siemens’ NX software for product engineering with Sony’s breakthrough head-mounted display (HMD) to enable the industrial metaverse.

The XR HMD (SRH-S1) features Sony’s high-definition 1.3-type OLED Microdisplays with 4K resolution, and its proprietary rendering technology enables real-time, high-definition and realistic rendering of 3D objects. It also has a pair of controllers optimised for intuitive interaction with 3D objects and precise pointing. The head-mounted display is also optimised for extended creative use, designed with comfort and stability in mind.

“We embarked on this collaborative project with Sony to deliver the power of the industrial metaverse to our community of designers, engineers and manufacturers directly in our flagship product engineering software,” said Bob Haubrock, senior vice president of Product Engineering Software at Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Our collective teams have built a set of tools that revolutionise how mixed reality is used in the engineering space. This not only supports global collaboration based on high-fidelity 3D models, but also enables co-creation directly on vital 3D CAD data in a managed, secure environment. We are now making this next generation set of technologies available to our customers.”

“Since announcing our collaboration with Siemens we’ve had opportunities to get direct feedback from Siemens’ customers about the technology, and as Siemens’ NX users ourselves, we were excited that many of them share our enthusiasm for the potential of immersive engineering,” said Seiya Amatatsu from the XR Technology Development Division at Sony Corporation.

“Siemens’ immersive engineering technology helps our designers and engineers see, design and edit parts more easily with the unique controllers, enabling our customers to experience their car at human scale before it is built, and helping stakeholders from production to collaborate easily with designers and engineers to validate parts before manufacturing,” said Ian Briggs, founder and head of Design at Briggs Automotive Company (BAC).

The Siemens immersive engineering toolset brings the power of mixed reality to the product engineering and manufacturing community, enabling high-fidelity mixed reality and 3D-focused collaboration. It includes:

NX Immersive Explorer: A headset-agnostic solution that designers and engineers use to conduct informal design reviews and collaborate using 3D CAD data derived from Siemens NX software for product engineering.

NX Immersive Designer: Designed from the ground up to take advantage of the capabilities of Sony’s HMD and creative controllers, this enables designers and engineers to interact, manipulate and collaborate around graphically rich 3D product models natively in NX, without the need for additional preparation or software. Using Sony’s Ring and Pointer controllers for object interaction and precise 3D geometry manipulation, designers and engineers can interact directly with product prototypes, NX commands and menus.

NX Immersive Designer supports augmented, mixed reality environments to place virtual objects in the real world, conduct design sessions in a high-fidelity virtual design review space and/or through large scale, high-resolution virtual monitors to extend and supplement the virtual design session. For even more efficient interaction, users can take advantage of NX Voice Command Assistant in the immersive environment to navigate multiple levels of menus and clicks with simple, easy-to-use spoken keywords.

NX Immersive Collaborator: This builds on the capabilities of NX Immersive Explorer and Designer to allow organisations of all sizes to take advantage of both co-located and remote design review with multiple participants. NX Immersive Collaborator requires Siemens cloud-enabled NX X to host design collaboration and review sessions. Participants can join using local VR or desktop view for broad collaboration options. Value-based licensing tokens are used for only hosting sessions, with participants able to join remotely for free.

Availability

NX Immersive Designer is available for all NX customers with the latest updates and through Siemens value-based licensing. NX Immersive Collaborator is available with the NX X update and also through value-based licensing. The NX Immersive Engineering tools have been developed to work exclusively with Sony’s HMD offering that includes 4K OLED Microdisplays and dedicated controllers. The HMD with the controllers is needed for both NX Immersive Designer and Collaborator.

For more information contact Siemens South Africa, [email protected], www.siemens.co.za


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