BMW Group is at the forefront of a key new manufacturing trend — going digital-first by using the virtual world to optimize layouts, robotics and logistics systems years before production really starts. The automaker announced today with NVIDIA at GTC that it’s expanding its use of the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for building and operating industrial metaverse applications across its production network around the world, including the planned electric vehicle plant in Debrecen, Hungary, that will only start operations in 2025. In his GTC keynote, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang shared a demo in which he was joined by BMW Group’s Milan Nedeljković, member of the board of management, to officially open the automaker’s first entirely virtual factory, powered by NVIDIA Omniverse . “We are excited and incredibly proud of the progress BMW has made with Omniverse. The partnership will continue to push the frontiers of virtual integration and virtual tooling for the next generation of smart-connected factories around the world,” Huang said during the GTC keynote. Omniverse — the culmination of over 25 years of NVIDIA graphics, accelerated computing, simulation and AI technologies — enables manufacturing companies to plan and optimize multibillion-dollar factory projects entirely virtually. This means […]