Siemens and Sony partner on immersive engineering for the industrial metaverse
Image: Siemens Digital Industries Software
Siemens Digital Industries Software is integrating its NX software for product engineering with the Sony head-mounted display to enable the industrial metaverse.
The development, announced at the CES 2025 show in Las Vegas, features a new set of software tools focussed on design and visualisation in the extended reality (XR) environment.
The XR head-mounted display (SRH-S1) features Sony’s high definition 1.3-type OLED microdisplays with 4K resolution, with its proprietary rendering technology enabling real-time, high definition rendering of 3D objects.
The display, which is optimised for comfort and stability for extended use, also has a pair of controllers optimised for intuitive interaction with 3D objects and precise pointing.
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“We embarked on this collaborative project with Sony to deliver the power of the industrial metaverse to our community of designers, engineers and manufacturers,” explained Bob Haubrock, Senior VP Product Engineering Software at Siemens Digital Industries Software.
“After previewing the display at CES last year, our collective teams have built a set of tools that revolutionise how mixed reality is used in the engineering space – to not only support global collaboration based on high-fidelity 3D models, but to enable co-creation directly on vital 3D CAD data in a managed, secure environment.”
Siemens’ Immersive Engineering suite comprises three components.
NX Immersive Explorer is a headset-agnostic solution for designers and engineers to conduct informal design reviews and collaborate using 3D CAD data derived from Siemens’ NX software for product engineering.
NX Immersive Designer is aimed for designers and engineers to interact, manipulate and collaborate around graphically rich 3D product models natively in NX.
NX Immersive Collaborator builds on the capabilities of NX Immersive Explorer and Designer to allow organisations to take advantage of both co-located and remote design review with multiple participants.
Seiya Amatatsu, Incubation Centre, XR Technology Development Division, Sony Corporation, adds: “Since announcing our collaboration with Siemens at CES 2024, 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.”
Digital twins and startups
Alongside the XR headset advance, at CES 2025 Siemens Digital Industries Software also announced a new industrial metaverse software solution, Teamcenter Digital Reality Viewer, bringing NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform and accelerated computing to Teamcenter to enable photorealistic visualisation of large, complex datasets common in engineering and manufacturing.
The viewer embeds real time ray tracing capabilities directly into Teamcenter to enable companies to seamlessly visualise and interact with photorealistic, physics-based digital twins of their products.
Last but not least Siemens also launched ‘Siemens for Startups’ to empower early-stage engineering and manufacturing startups. In collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) the programme is aimed to deliver access to Siemens Xcelerator ecosystem to accelerate innovation among these startups.
As a co-developer, Siemens will collaborate with the startups through venture clienting, gaining access to cutting-edge capabilities and services and providing startups with the early revenue needed for growth.
