One of the biggest technology conferences of the year takes place annually right after the new year, with the Consumer Electronics Show, more well-known as CES. Every January in Las Vegas, technology enthusiasts from around the world come together for this show that features a presence from nearly every corner of consumer technology that comes to mind. Of course, given the name, one wouldn't think there is too much crossover between the technology featured at this event and what is covered here at Geo Week News. However, as CES has evolved there are major announcements made by some enterprise-focused companies as well that bear following for those in the geospatial and AEC sectors.
That NVIDIA has made the most noise in this realm this year shouldn’t come as much of a surprise as they have largely dominated the technology news space from nearly every angle throughout this AI boom. They certainly made announcements around their GPUs and workstations this week, but what is most interesting to us is a series of announcements around their Omniverse product for digital twins, and physical AI.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang gave a keynote address at CES earlier this week, and the presentation covered a number of different angles. One of the backdrops to his talk, as shown here on LinkedIn by Michael Quan, showcased companies from many different industries that contribute to Omniverse, and reality capture is specifically called out there with companies like Hexagon, NavVis, Bentley, and more being highlighted. He spoke to the idea that point clouds and 3D capture is going to be key ground truth data for the future developments of Omniverse.
Speaking of which, there were a handful of announcements made with Omniverse and new innovations around their artificial intelligence. That includes this announcement of new generative AI models that they say “expand[s] NVIDIA Omniverse integration further into physical AI applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, and vision AI.” Physical AI is seemingly the next step for digital twins, but NVIDIA identifies three key steps that are required: world-building, labeling the world with physical attributes, and making it photoreal. All of these capabilities are enhanced by advancements in reality capture and digital twin technology.
That plays into one of the major themes of CES: Robotics. It seems as though we are reaching an inflection point toward robots – both industrial and humanoid – being able to perform tasks in the physical world, and we’ve seen a lot of announcements throughout this week talking about this. Take this announcement, also from NVIDIA, talking about the potential for “Industrial Robot Fleet Digital Twins.” Facility managers have been at the cutting edge of a lot of physical technology over the years, and now these latest developments with Omniverse and similar spaces are leading to more software-based simulation solutions to harness this work even more.
It wasn’t just NVIDIA making major announcements around robotics and digital twins, either. Siemens – who works closely with NVIDIA – unveiled their own innovations in the industrial metaverse space, which has always been an area in which they put tremendous focus. Additionally, there was plenty of excitement around lidar for robotics, giving a better way for these robotic solutions to see and perceive the world. Last decade, we saw the autonomous vehicle sector embrace lidar for similar reasons, and as robotics takes its next leap forward we are seeing a similar draw toward lidar sensors.
The year is only getting started, and there will be many trends and innovations that emerge throughout 2025 that will change our perspective of which ways the wind is blowing in different sectors. Given the way things have started at CES, it seems smart to look for big advancements in digital twins, physical simulations, and robotics – all of which are going to be built off of reality capture, lidar, and other key geospatial tools.
