CES 2024: Siemens eyes up immersive tech, AI to enable industrial metaverse

At CES 2024, tech firm Siemens announced new partnerships and what it claims are breakthroughs in AI and immersive engineering to enable the industrial metaverse based on its Xcelerator open digital business platform.

Siemens revealed that it had strengthened its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make it easier for businesses of all sizes and industries to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

“We envision the industrial metaverse as a virtual world that is nearly indistinguishable from reality, enabling people – along with AI – to collaborate in real time to address real-world challenges,” said Siemens CEO Roland Busch, explaining the reasons for the partnerships.

“This will empower customers to accelerate innovation, enhance sustainability and adopt new technologies faster and at scale, leading to a profound transformation of entire industries and our everyday lives. Together with our customers and partners, Siemens is proud to announce new products that will bring the industrial metaverse a step closer to all of us.”

With Sony Corporation, Siemens will be introducing a solution that combines the Xcelerator portfolio of industry software with Sony’s spatial content creation system, featuring the XR head-mounted display with high-quality 4K OLED Microdisplays and controllers for intuitive interaction with 3D objects.

Looking to enable designers and engineers to create and explore design concepts in a borderless immersive workspace, Siemens is confident that the new solution will kickstart content creation for the industrial metaverse.​

Expected to be available later in 2024, Siemens’ NX Immersive Designer, an integrated solution that combines Siemens’ NX software and Sony technology, brings immersive design and collaborative product engineering capabilities to Siemens’ flagship product engineering solution.

“At Sony, we are passionate about empowering creators with cutting-edge technologies, and in the field of spatial content creation, we have thrived in innovating the way they work by utilising our proprietary motion and display technologies,” said Yoshinori Matsumoto, executive deputy president and officer in charge of technology and incubation, Sony Corporation.

“By combining our technologies and Siemens’ expertise in engineering, we are excited to enable more immersive engineering that redefines the daily workflow of designers and engineers. The high-quality, realistic rendering and intuitive interaction will give creators tools to pursue a more immersive creative processes that fuels further innovation in the industrial metaverse.”

The solution is being demonstrated at CES 2024 in collaboration with Red Bull Racing, showing how the solution frees engineers from traditional constraints to bring together the virtual and physical worlds by immersing them in the industrial metaverse.  

With AWS, Siemens is integrating Amazon Bedrock – a service that offers a choice of high-performing foundation models from leading AI companies via a single API, along with security, privacy, and responsible AI capabilities – with Mendix, the leading low-code platform that is part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio.

Siemens has also introduced opportunities for customers, partners and developers with the Xcelerator Developer Experience. This is described as a first-of-its-kind platform consolidating all Siemens’ APIs and developer resources, providing developers a unified space to explore and access Siemens and partner APIs.