Ericsson uses Nvidia Omniverse to simulate 5G challenges

Semiconductor giant Nvidia has a simulation platform that companies can use to create virtual copies of real-life environments.

You’ve heard of the metaverse, well Nvidia’s take on it – the omniverse – is, if anything, even more dystopian on the ear. Nonetheless Swedish kit vendor is using Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise to create digital twins of entire cities in order to be able to simulate and anticipate physical challenges faced by nascent 5G networks.

According to the Nvidia announcement Ericsson can now accurately contemplate obstacles such as buildings and trees without leaving the house, thanks to the good old Omniverse. They’ve even done a video explaining all this arch cleverness that you can see below.

“Before Omniverse, coverage and capacity of networks was analyzed by simplifying many aspects of the complex interactions, such as the physical phenomena and mobility aspects,” said Germán Ceballos, a researcher at Ericsson. “Now we’ll be able to simulate network deployments and features in a highly detailed scale using Omniverse.”

Nvidia has been working on this tool for a while, but Facebook’s rebrand with the metaverse in mind seems to have awoken the augmented reality/virtual reality Kraken when it comes to public pronouncements.

In the second video below you can see Niantic – creator of the Pokemon Go AR-ish game – bigging up its Lightship platform, which provides a bunch of AR tools for other developers to use if they’re into that sort of thing. It’s tempting to say “shit got real” but, in fact, quite the opposite is true. Interesting times.