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Platform Overview#

NVIDIA Omniverse™ breaks down into core technologies and services, which you can directly integrate into tools and applications, customizing as needed. This approach simplifies adoption and reduces unnecessary development overhead.

Omniverse provides developers with building blocks including SDKs, pre-built services via APIs, Omniverse Libraries, and associated developer tooling.

There are three main categories of functionality that the Omniverse platform provides:

  • OpenUSD Data Exchange: Manage, author, and aggregate OpenUSD data.

  • Build OpenUSD Applications and Services: Use SDKs, APIs, and Libraries to create OpenUSD applications and services.

  • Deploy OpenUSD Applications and Services: Manage your own deployment of OpenUSD applications.

OpenUSD Data Exchange#

OpenUSD is an open-source standard used to aggregate and work with 3D scene data. Omniverse provides tools and solutions for managing and authoring OpenUSD data.

Storage APIs#

The Omniverse Storage APIs are a collection of gRPC and REST API specifications, along with microservice adapters. They are designed to work on top of your existing storage and infrastructure services, so you can use them directly within the Omniverse platform in a consistent way. This stack is designed to be deployed with Kubernetes or for development purposes with MicroK8s.

For more information, see the Storage APIs documentation.

Enterprise Nucleus Server#

The Enterprise Nucleus Server is a database and collaboration engine that enables real-time exchange of OpenUSD data. With Nucleus, you can connect multiple users working in their preferred 3D applications, providing a single source of truth for their 3D data via OpenUSD. Nucleus offers a set of fundamental services that let client applications, renderers, and microservices share and modify representations of virtual worlds.

For more information, see the Nucleus documentation.

OpenUSD Exchange SDK#

The OpenUSD Exchange SDK accelerates OpenUSD adoption by helping developers design and develop their own USD I/O solutions that produce consistent and correct USD assets across diverse 3D ecosystems.

The OpenUSD Exchange SDK also provides higher-level convenience functions on top of lower-level USD concepts, so developers can quickly adopt OpenUSD best practices when mapping their native data sources to OpenUSD-legible data models.

For more information, see the OpenUSD Exchange SDK documentation.

OpenUSD Connections#

OpenUSD Connections and Data Exchange, formerly known as Omniverse Connect, is a collection of importers, exporters, converters, and USD file format plugins that enable various 3D applications, products, and file formats to exchange data using OpenUSD. These tools allow for quick import and conversion into OpenUSD from a variety of 3D file formats.

For more information, see the OpenUSD Connections documentation.

Building OpenUSD Applications#

There are several components that provide developers with the ability to build OpenUSD applications.

Omniverse Libraries#

Omniverse Libraries, part of NVIDIA Agent Toolkit, include open-source and accelerated tools for agents and software developers to integrate prebuilt physical AI simulation capabilities into their applications and services. Agents can call on these capabilities as tools, while Omniverse skills help orchestrate agentic workflows across simulation pipelines.

For more information, see Omniverse on the NVIDIA Developer site.

Kit SDK#

The Omniverse Kit SDK is a framework for building OpenUSD-based applications and services from scratch using Python or C++. It offers convenient integrations with rendering, physics, OpenUSD, and other tools, enabling developers to concentrate on the domain-specific aspects of their projects. At its core, the Kit SDK provides a robust system for efficiently managing extensions and plugins, and equips developers with the means to combine NVIDIA-provided and custom-developed extensions to create tailored applications and services.

For more information, see the Kit SDK documentation.

USD APIs#

USD APIs are a collection of containerized services exposed via an intuitive API that enable developers to integrate AI-powered USD functionality into their applications. With these production-ready services, developers can deploy USD APIs onto their own infrastructure.

To explore USD APIs and AI models, see the NVIDIA API Catalog.

Omniverse Blueprints#

NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprints are reference workflows that enable you to easily implement and build 3D, simulation, AI, and digital twin applications. These blueprints are customizable examples that equip enterprise developers with services, reference code, documentation, and Helm charts for deployment.

To explore the latest Omniverse Blueprints, see Omniverse Blueprints on GitHub.

Deploying OpenUSD Applications#

Omniverse Streaming on NVCF#

Omniverse Streaming on NVCF (NVIDIA Cloud Functions) is a self-hosted reference architecture for deploying and scaling streaming applications on NVIDIA Cloud Functions (NVCF). The reference architecture provides a defined set of artifacts, versions, and steps that fit together into a validated streaming deployment on AWS or Azure infrastructure. Follow it as documented, or adapt it to your environment.

For more information, see the Omniverse Streaming on NVCF documentation.