Omniverse

Description

Omniverse website  

NVIDIA Omniverse is a platform for creating and operating metaverse applications. It is a platform of APIs, SDKs, and services that enable developers to integrate OpenUSD, NVIDIA RTX™ rendering technologies, and generative physical AI into existing software tools and simulation workflows for industrial and robotic use cases. It has been used for applications in the visual effects and animation as well. Omniverse makes extensive use of the Universal Scene Description (USD) format, which should generally be the primary focus of those wishing to leverage the technology. Omniverse apps are all built upon the Omniverse Kit SDK, a highly modular application system that makes custom development a breeze. The support for running Omniverse on HiPerGator is limited to certain applications.

Learn more about Omniverse:

1. NVIDIA Omniverse Docs[1]

2. NVIDIA Omniverse Developer Overview[2]

3. NVIDIA Omniverse Youtube Channel [3]

Omniverse Launcher [4]

The NVIDIA Omniverse™ Launcher is your first step into the Omniverse. Giving you immediate access to all the apps, connectors and other downloads the Omniverse Launcher is your gateway to the Omniverse. With an intuitive Interface, Launcher allows a quick experience for opening and updating Omniverse Apps and Connectors. This module has been deprecated, and will cease online function in October 2025. It is not recommended to use.

Omniverse Applications

Omniverse applications are built using Omniverse Kit, a versatile SDK with an emphasis on modularity. Kit apps are given functionality through the use of extensions that developers can mix and match or build themselves. Nvidia supplies a number of core extensions that can be used to kickstart development, such as the omni.ui extension for easily building UI systems.

Nvidia built a number of example applications using the suite of extensions for Kit they developed. Some, like Isaac Sim, are distributed by Nvidia directly, while others are considered "templates" that are accessible from the kit-app-template repository.

• Omniverse Isaac Sim [5]:

NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac Sim is a robotics simulation toolkit for the NVIDIA Omniverse platform. Isaac Sim has essential features for building virtual robotic worlds and experiments. It provides researchers and practitioners with the tools and workflows they need to create robust, physically accurate simulations and synthetic datasets. Isaac Sim supports navigation and manipulation applications through ROS/ROS2. It simulates sensor data from sensors such as RGB-D, Lidar, and IMU for various computer vision techniques such as domain randomization, ground-truth labeling, segmentation, and bounding boxes.

• USD Composer, Explorer, Presenter [6]:

The USD Composer, Explorer, and Presenter apps are now template apps available through the kit-app-template development repo. They are relatively simple Kit apps that are designed to be built upon and customized to the needs of the user which provide an interface to interact with 3D USD environments. Once the templates are installed, users can access the .kit files associated with them to add and remove extensions and define each app's functionality.

Steps to install the NVIDIA Omniverse Launcher and Omniverse Applications *DEPRECATED*

It is no longer recommended to install the launcher. Instead, you may utilize the template apps in the kit-app-template[7], install a program like Isaac Sim directly[8], or use any Omniverse Tools available in the Nvidia Catalog[9].

Legacy Instructions

1. Navigate to the HiPerGator OpenOnDemand[ood.rc.ufl.edu] webpage. Request a HiPerGator Desktop on a hwgui node with a RTX6000 GPU [10].

2. Once you enter the HiPerGator Desktop, download the free standard omniverse launcher from https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/omniverse/download/. You may need to register to download the Omniverse launcher.

3. Open a terminal and make the downloaded file executable:
 chmod +x omniverse-launcher-linux.AppImage
or alternatively open the file properties and check "Allow this file to run as a program" in the permissions tab.
NOTE: It is advised to run the launcher from the terminal as at the time of writing, launched apps will crash unless you run the line
 export MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.6
before running the Omniverse launcher AppImage file with:
 ./omniverse-launcher-linux.AppImage

4. The first time you log into the Omniverse Launcher, you will be asked to sign up and login. Just follow the instructions to create an NVIDIA developer account and login.

5. When you first load up the Omniverse launcher, it will ask you to select the library path, data path, content path, and cache locations. Ensure that these point to directories you create in your Blue storage. If they are left at default, the 40 gigabytes on your login node will almost immediately fill up. If you need to change these file paths later, the library, data, and content paths can be changed by clicking on the user settings in the top right [11]. These paths, including the cache location, can be changed through the omniverse.toml file located in /home/your-username/.nvidia-omniverse/config/

6. In the Exchange tab, search and select any applications (e.g. Issac Sim) you wish to install. It may take some time to download and install them. Once the application is installed, you may find it in the "Library" tab

7. In order to start an application, select it in the Library tab and click the launch button [12].

8. You can explore more about installing Isaac Sim at this page [13].