Hello, and good day to you from episode 20 of our podcast series Project Breakaway, a metaphorical and literal time in the day. When we at Predator Cycling take some time away from working in the back shop to come and share with our listeners what we're doing, how we're doing it, what it takes to do it, our ideas, our innovative success stories, and even our missteps and failures. If you find yourself with an interest in bicycles, composite manufacturing, out of the box design, or even curiosities beyond, I encourage you to stick with us, settle in and learn a little. I'm Courtney B, co-owner and project manager of Predator Cycling. I'm here with my partner Arm Goan, the other co-owner, CEO, lead designer and engineer and virtual superhero at Predator Cycling. What? How's it going, Arm? Great. I'm a superhero. Superhero. So good morning. Good morning. Good congested morning. Yes. You're both sick. Again. In the never ending year of sicknesses. Yes. Luckily it's not COVID. No, it's not COVID. But it it's daycare stomach bug followed by daycare head cold and ear ache. Followed by, I guess this is now daycare sinus cold. I don't know. Yeah, it hit last night. But it's just, oh God. I just want to be healthy. Anyway, let's let's try and get through this episode, which I think is a heavy episode. In the sense of the topic. And I don't know how fuzzy my brain is, so. We'll try and open her up. I think you'll be just fine. Okay. So, um, we were intending on having a guest Mike Gyer from Nvidia on this episode. To talk about a product that they have that we're really interested in taking on and seeing what we can do with it in the future. Um, but uh, we ran into a few scheduling conflicts. So we decided to focus this episode on the same topic, but more from uh, what we think the product is, how we can use it, how we can manipulate it, enhance it, and work it into our world here. And then hopefully next week, we get Mike uh, on the horn, does anyone say that anymore? I don't know. We're getting him on the virtual horn, um, so that we can have an Nvidia professional explain the product, um, from the, you know, uh, company side as opposed to our customer side. Yeah, it's always interesting too to see the different perspectives on how the software or, you know, the product is perceived to be. Yes. So. So the product that we were talking about, uh, I never heard of until, uh, I don't know if you ever heard of it. Until they brought it to our attention. But it's called, um, Omniverse. Yeah. They they debuted it, I think it was released at GTC last year. So, I had, I mean, kind of. I heard of it. I heard of it. I didn't really, anyway. I didn't really think it was applicable to us. I didn't think it was something that we would use. Um, and then actually when I was doing another talk with Mike, Mike brought it to my attention again and was kind of like, you should really look at this. And then I kind of took a little bit of a deeper dive into trying to understand it. And, anyways, it's pretty cool. Okay. Well, let me tell you about my deep dive. Yes. Um, so Omniverse in the Marvel comic world. It's described as a collection of every universe, the multiverse, the megaverse, the dimensions and realms. In Nvidia's world, they describe it broadly as a multi GPU real-time simulation and collaboration platform for 3D production based on a collaboration of Pixar's universal scene description and Nvidia's RTX technology. So basically, instead of a melting pot of crossovers between Wolverine and Batman and Luke Skywalker, and like Fred Flinstone. Uh, where timelines and continuity don't exist, it's more of like a conglomeration of different design apps, all interconnected into a 3D ecosystem. And that's my explanation. And that's the episode. Thanks, guys. And I think that sums it up. I mean, that's a lot. I I I did the Marvel, um, uh, or the superhero, um, Now. What's the word I'm looking for? Analogy. Analogy. There you go. I almost said parallel. Same thing. I don't know. Anyway, uh, analogy because that's easier for my brain to comprehend. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's it's it's so. So yeah. I want you to describe your best definition of what Omniverse is and what it's trying to do. So Omniverse is kind of like, it's it's a multi there's a couple different aspects of it. One of it that intrigues me, well, okay, there's two parts of it that really are intriguing. but one of the really cool parts is that it's kind of it's a collaboration. They talk about collaboration a lot. And it's really cool because what they're trying to do is they have these connectors that connect different softwares and you kind of touched on this. And you can actually edit stuff in the native software and it will update live in Omniverse. So it's kind of like this, I think they call it the nucleus, which is their server. Oh, okay. So yeah. So according to their website, they have five key parts of Omniverse. Which is the nucleus, connect, kit, which I believe is to create your own apps and extensions. Um, simulation, which has its own physics solvers, which we'll discuss and RT and RTX render. So let's go through that, starting with the nucleus. Yeah, so like, I mean, our approach is basically the idea that we have a nucleus, which is kind of like a a big file server. Oh, and then also, sorry to interrupt. They said that before all that on the website, they talked about a USD file format. Which I assume is incorporated into all five of those parts. Yes. And like, so like, for instance, for me, USD was not, I mean, it's relatively new. And USD is what? It's a uh, it stands for universal scene universal scene description. Oh, okay, so that's the Pixar's. That's Pixar's. Let me look at my notes. Uh, what did I say it was? Yeah, it's it's. Pixar Universal scene description. Oh. So that's just a file format. That's USD is a file format. And what's cool about USD? Okay. So like, okay, back up just a little bit. So the idea of the idea of Omniverse is to basically, or at least how I perceive it. Is to make a virtual world that's interconnected with software. So we have different softwares we build, um, bicycle parts in, we build machine parts, we build all kinds of stuff we design. Those things all exist in the real world. Yeah. Now we can they can exist in Omniverse. And the cool thing is is that as I'm building something, um, it will it can be linked to Omniverse and be updating. So I could have a for instance, we could make a virtual version of our shop, which we actually already have. We have a CAD model of our entire shop with all our machinery in it. We could load that into Omniverse and as I'm working on a new machine, that machine could update inside of Omniverse. So I'm picturing is you're taking all of your little softwares. Yeah. And you can and I'm like picturing the Sims. Yes. I'm picturing the Sims in a machine shop. Like your machine shop. Yes. Yes. I mean, essentially, yes, that's the idea. And and the thing that makes it cool is let's say, for instance. I'm designing something in, um, in in in Rhino. I'm doing some surface work in Rhino. And you are referencing that that surface or that part inside of. Okay, I'm designing a surface in Rhino and you're designing something else in Fusion. And those are both living inside of Omniverse. As you and I are both making changes, it is updating in Omniverse. So it could be this for for me, I I'm thinking of it as this, we use all these different tools. It's like a interconnected network of all of our all of our different tools. Could all live inside of Omniverse. It could basically be our asset storage system in the future. Like all of our assets, like we use, we use Fusion a lot. We use Fusion cloud. But we could start linking it into Omniverse, so when we use Rhino or we use, um, you know, a Photoshop to do like photo editing of like pictures of some of our products. Those things could all coexist in Omniverse. uploaded into the. Into the Omniverse realm. Uh, but this goes across multiple industries. This is not just. And that's the reason I didn't think it was very relevant to us when I first saw it. So you think it was more because when I hear Pixar, I'm like, oh, it's movies and animation. That's exactly what I thought. Which I'm thinking like, oh, Mike Wazowski's jumping through. Exactly. You know, he's in the upper world now. Well, and that's the thing is that. The demos that they were doing, that's what they showed. They showed the marble demo, which if I maybe we can put a link on our on our uh post for the. Okay. thing. It's super cool. They show this like marble dropping down this like row and hitting things and knocking stuff over. And it's like super cool and it's like, wow, it's amazing. But like, what am I going to do with it? So, for their example, it's because they, I'm sure, all sorts of engineers and and designers and animators use multi software. And they all bring it all together to make their movie. So, right. And and so where Omniverse gets interesting is one, you have that functionality where you have this data link of of software. And things that interconnect to bring stuff in. But the other thing that makes it really powerful is that you can it's it's it's a virtual. It's virtual reality, I mean, you're it's essentially you're building yourself this interactive space. So you could technically look at your screen and see like, um, okay. So you can look and see our shop. Like we've made a whole. of our job. And you can see like a little person like I said, like I said walking. But you could also slap on some VR goggles and become that first person person. First person person. Yes. You you could do it inside of it's called Cloud XR, which we've been experimenting with on without outside of Omniverse. Um, which basically is a VR portal that you could experience um that VR VR goggles on and be immersed into. Which people are using for like training, which has been around for a while. Like, I'm a grocery store clerk and I need to learn how to scan. So exactly. Which would have been nice. When I worked at a big box store and I was put on cashier and I was given one laminated sheet to learn how to do my job. So now you can do that with like like augmented reality where you have like glasses like Lenovo just came out with their new glasses, their augmented glasses. So you could have those on and within Omniverse you have your entire uh supermarket built and you could have an interface that builds in. Or like medical, I know the medical industry is doing that to like learn how to be a surgeon. It's kind of like when I had a Wii. I had a pilot that I was learning how to do stitches and I had the thingies. Yeah, yeah. It's it's similar. I mean it's the same concept. And anyway, so Omniverse is that virtual thing. And one of the things that they built Omniverse from for, to my understanding was to train um, I I believe it's it's Isaac, which is their robotic control systems, their whole AI system for robots and autonomous. Like autonomous vehicles, autonomous uh like robots that go through your shop, um all of that is what they built it for. Isaac, is that like a software that you could program to any old robot? Not any old robot, but. They don't have like a proprietary robot. No, no. You have you have like your own robot. It's like an operating, it's an SDK for robots. So they're trying to like, well, I'm sure they already broken into the manufacturing industry. But for some like like you're talking like car manufacturing, huge manufacturing with robots and whatever. Now, talk about our small business. Because we're a little A to Z manufacturer at a very, very small scale. Right. And that's why we didn't we were like, Omniverse, okay, whatever. And then they introduced it to us and explain how like we think the potential of how we would use it. So the cool thing with Omniverse is that it's like an open platform, so you can build on top of it. And they have you talked about it briefly kit. Excuse me. Um, you briefly talked about it kit, which is basically their system where you can build everything on top of. So what. Oh, we skipped connect. It's nucleus connect kit. Well, okay, so. Connect is their is how it it connects to a program. So like, for instance, if I fusion's not supported yet, but if fusion was supported, there'd be a connector between fusion and your nucleus. So it would update everything from fusion into your nucleus. Okay. And then that would be accessible through things like kit, which we use um, they have a a program that they built. Which is called create, which is basically a um, you can create assets for Omniverse. So like I we for instance, I brought in our water bottle cage, the genius bottle cage and I brought in our frame, the RF 20. So kit is like a App Store, but they had like a create app. But you can also make your own app. So create is the is the tool that you can use to make your own apps. Okay. And they've already made some apps for you. Okay. So they've made an app called create. And that's what you threw our stuff in. And I used that to basically create a a virtual asset of our products. So I was able to add things. Very similar to what I could do like in keyshot. So it makes the render. It it creates a high quality render. So you created a high quality render of our bottle cage. Yeah. So like in the future, if you threw in like a virtual predator cycling storefront, you could throw those water bottle cages like on a virtual wall. Yeah. I could. And I could virtually walk into the store and virtually walk up to the wall and then. If I had the fancy virtual goggles and gloves, I could pick up a virtual water bottle cage. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah, yeah, I mean I mean I don't think you can do that right now. But you can do it um probably in the near future. Um, yeah, you could. Um, you could currently what you could do is I could create a bike. Um RF 20 fully done with textures and everything built out and it would be built in USD file format. The that asset would live in a USD file. Yeah. And then you could for instance, have the bike so that um it has, well, we're going to talk about this in a second, but it has physics involved. So you could have it so that I could hold the like push the bike. And the bike would roll and like the handlebars would move as they should and the chain would move and everything would engage correctly. Right. Um, but most importantly, I could experience that I could experience the bike in a photo realistic way in VR. Right. Which is really cool. And it's accessible. to a small tiny company like us. Right. So that makes it cool. And then anyways, you layer physics on top of it, you layer um open APIs where you can have build things with kits so that you can maybe build like a configurator, maybe you can build some sort of integration with our like factory data like through MQTT data that's coming in from our shop for presses and update our omniverse experience that way. So if I was like a customer and I walked in and I wanted a bike and I wanted to be, I knew my measurements and then I saw your bike and then could I I could update my measurements in real time on that bike. Maybe, I mean, I don't know if you can do that yet, but like that's kind of where I'm going with it for sure. Or I could I could literally download the data of the bike. If we made it available. So I could save it. Well, in theory like I could download it and then save it for later and then, you know, as I ponder buying a, you know, $10,000 bike in the next couple months, I just keep reopening the file and looking at it. Yes, you could just keep going to the website too. Right, but like the interesting thing for for Omniverse could be is one is the interconnected interconnectivity of the data. But then the idea of like imagine our shop. So we have what, three machine, two machines right now that are fully smart machines. So we're actually capturing data on them. They're updating data. Um, we don't use MQTT, but we can um to log the data. And I and I believe Omniverse will take in MQTT data, which is what most robotic systems use. Uh-huh. Um it's just send receive message. So we could send for instance information to Omniverse saying like, hey, plat is open, hey, plat is hot. And that could update, so you could in VR look at our shop and see that the plat is up and down. Yeah. So I wouldn't even have to come in the back. No, and the thing is I just log on and see everything virtually on my computer. Exactly. And then on top of that, you could actually update it through Omniverse, like you could build an interface where you could actually update like, oh, like the temperatures are off or oh, this machine's not running or oh, this machine needs to do this. And we could actually start building interconnectivity. And in a happy world where I had lots of money and robots, I wouldn't even have to come in the back. I would just watch the robots. So then you could start where where it gets really interesting is now you have the ability to you have this virtual version of your shop. It's essentially a digital twin of your entire shop that's linked. So it's it's updated. This has been a movie. This has been a movie that's been done. I don't know. Maybe. No, robots are doing everything. I don't know, I'm not a big sci-fi person. But like the idea is now you have this this virtual version of your shop. It's constantly updating. So now if you were going to train robots in your shop. You wouldn't have to come into the shop to train them, you could virtually train them in Omniverse with the software. And obviously in their case you want to use Isaac. Um and then once that's done, you could basically implement and deploy them. And once those are implemented and deployed, then they're just running in the shop. Or if you had for instance a new employee and you wanted to train them. Instead of putting them in the back of the shop with $10,000 bikes all over the place and, you know, expensive machinery. You put them in the back with $10,000 robots. No, you put them inside of. Your new employee is a robot. Why are you training them? Just upload. No, but like if you had somebody coming in to run the shop or you wanted to train them. You could then actually have them train with, you know, in VR and experience the shop and understand how everything works. Right. Um before they went in the back of the shop, um where you could actually, you know, lose product or something could get damaged or someone could get hurt. You that training could happen there. And we could learn things about what's going on in the shop. Anyways. It's cool. So talk about the physics solvers because you use physics solvers. It's an Ansis product. Yes. What's the difference? So the difference here is that you're talking about physics in the sense, well, so it does a lot of physics similar to Ansis. Um it it uses it has flow, it has gravity, it has some structural stuff. But it's not doing things like Ansis is doing in the in the finite like analysis. So like we're not looking at structures. So for instance, we talked about um gravity, so like we can make assemblies and um and movement and joints in Omniverse. So that a bicycle will work the way it should. It gravity acts the way it should. Um if you know, you lean the bike up and you tip, you touch the bike, it tips over and falls. And when it hits the ground, it bounces and falls correctly. Um or the chain engages correctly because the chain is pushing against the chain rings and it's, you know, pulling against the cassettes and the gears are all moving. So it needs the physics solvers built in like so if you're showing me a bike and you said you wanted to like roll it over to me virtually. It needs to know. It needs physics in order to know how to how all the properties are going to interact with each other. Or like the air pressure in the tire, so when you sit on the bike, the tires go down. How much do they go down? How much do they deflect? Things like that it needs to know. So it has solvers to do that. But you have to set that up for each like little thing. Yeah, it's it's and it's not as I've started to play with it a little bit. It's it's pretty it's actually pretty intuitive the way it works and you can set it up pretty quick. But now I couldn't do something like for instance, it it's not designed the physics solvers that it has are not designed to do something like we're doing with the the genius bottle cage. Where we're using topology optimization. It's not AI driven. Uh it maybe I I don't know what underlying drives it, but it's not going to run things like topology optimizations. And like really heavy things like that or do like failure structural testing on like materials and material properties. So it's not testing, it's just doing It's just doing it's a physics solver. Regular movement. Yeah, and it also does, I think they just released explosions, so you can like have like something explode now. And like the physics involved in explosions. It does flow like so like how like water drops. One of the things I've been playing with is um a water. Our our genius bottle cage and then having a water bottle with water inside of it. Oh yeah. And so when you put the bottle cage, when you put the bottle into the bottle cage, the water moves and swishes and moves. Um, that's what I've been doing for fun to try and learn how to use it better. Yeah, that's what I do for fun too. I just try to learn how to use it. So then the last of the five is the um uh RTX render, which they say is built on Pixar's Hydra architecture. These are very uh superhero words. It is, it's the tech industry. Um, so basically that means that the render does not rasterize before, which allows for very large scenes to be handled in real time. Yeah, it's it's uh and it's I mean Nvidia has put a lot of energy and money into real-time ray tracing. I don't know what that means. But I was telling Arm yesterday the way I understood it because I believe it or not. I actually have a degree in uh film and video production. And uh I'm I we had to do an editing class, which I'm not an editor, but it was required. And so you'd sit in the lab at uh Ohio University and um you would, you know, you'd render your your shots. Right. And you'd sit there and I remember before you could even watch it. You'd have to render your shot. Which back in, you know, 2006. Yeah. Took forever. So you would hit render before you wanted to watch literally a 10-second clip. Yeah. And then you'd go away and you'd come back and you know, someone had tripped over a wire. And everything was unplugged and you had to start over. And you were trying to save it to a 20-lb external hard drive. I think it was like Western something, something. Western Digital. And it was like 4 GB. And it's horrible. I had to carry it around my book bag. Anyway. So basically you had to raster or render everything. And what this is telling me is that I wouldn't have to do any of that. You wouldn't have to rasterize it beforehand. But I could watch my 10-second clip. Yeah, in real time. Without having to watch these little pixel boxes and it's slow. Well, and leave alone, I mean, don't even talk about the fact of the hardware that you have now. That you could do it in like milliseconds. Yeah, your your RTX A6000. Oh yeah, it's it's. And so. And you're saving it on not the 4 GB external hard drive. You're just like have like terabyte I don't even know terabytes like existed on that level of college editing at that time. Uh it probably did, it was just astronomically expensive. The rich kids. Not even the kids, studios. Um, but yeah, no, it's it's it's uh. The performance of it's pretty crazy. I mean, it's it's. It's very fast. So how do you use that? How you So I mean we've been using it in kit and well kit, which is built on we use create. And I've been using their um their their uh path tracing and ray tracing. So basically ray tracing is is following light and how light bounces off something. And it's basically creating the paths. So what did you throw in the cage? The cage. The light. The both. I've done both. And I've been rendering a couple of those render shots that you that actually we used on our some of our our marketing stuff is um. Is done with um Omniverse. Okay. It was done in Omniverse. And rendered in Omniverse. So we've only done like like still. I haven't done any I haven't done any animation. Animation or like. That's what I'm working on. Real live you could I'm sure you could just add animation to like a live action shot. Yeah. You can go all. Roger Rabbit. Um yeah, you could. I I don't know. I'm sure you could. I don't know how you would do it. I'm sure that the film industry is really like taking this off. I I'm sure. But I I watched some of the I didn't watch them, I looked over your shoulder at some of the videos of like how it's used in manufacturing. Yeah. Or how it. Well, uh BMW did one, they did a really good presentation at uh GTC. Which I was super psyched for. Yeah, they like built out their floor plan of their. About how. Their factory and they had little people like and little robots moving around. the fourth. Like shows you exactly how things are made. It's super cool. Which is cool. Which I really I'm curious if that's how it's actually done. Yeah. Cuz they don't show like one like a machine broken down on the floor and then like three people working on it. No. In real life. No, but like um it's it's very interesting how people are using it and how people are are are leveraging this kind of tech. And that's what I'm really excited for. I mean, cuz, you know, we talked about we've talked about several times in the podcast about how um we've introduced simulation and how it's completely changed the game for us. But now imagine like setting up our shop virtually in Omniverse, setting up products in Omniverse and like interconnecting everything together, experiencing it and even like test trying processes and stuff in it. Like I don't know, I just I really think that So if we had all the money in the world and the time and the help, what the hell would we do with this? Uh the first thing I would do is is well, I would move in all of our products, every single product, every component, and I would move everything into Omniverse and actually um properly create the material properties and everything for it. First thing is I would do that. And then I would start moving in the entire shop. And I'd put the whole shop and recreate inside of Omniverse and then data link all of our assets with the data that's coming off the machines. Um so that we could grab all of our um force load settings, uh everything that we have. Because we have, I mean, all of our products that we build, we actually do um composite layup orientation for, we do fiber material properties, we do simulations of. I would start taking all of that data that I can and put it all into Omniverse and recreate our entire shop with it and interconnect it with all the data. But then your wish list of what you could possibly do with this in the future. When we're billionaires. And then once I have that, then I could actually start building automation systems into it. So I would be using tools like I probably like Isaac and I would probably start. You start adding the big robots. I would start adding robots that would start. Big here six would be sitting here working with us, right? Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to come heal me. Um. Yeah, so like we would have things like that where we could actually start designing systems where we have like, for instance, one of the things that's a a lag for us currently is loading, unloading our our 3D printers. Um and getting them to finishing and and carrying them and and treating them and doing all like all of those processes that we're doing. We could very quickly with something like that, actually automate that out. So we could go lights out 24/7 production on uh print stuff. Instead of us manually reloading and loading machines. Manually reloading, forgetting, loading, forgetting, walking away. Yeah. I mean, like we have, I mean, there's definitely like there's no it's not a perfect system. So like that adding that type of automation would be huge. Yeah. And then imagine connecting that to like maybe our layup systems and like how we're doing our layups and automating that with vision and pick and packs so we could do like optimized um um kits pre-done for us. So we're not manually kidding things. And I mean, there are companies out there that do this. Yeah, there's there's. Or attempting to do this. One company I know of that actually is attempting it. But it's just cool, you know, smaller companies can dream. Yes. Um but no, the cool thing is is that we actually have, I mean, you have the tech that's there. It's not. We have the access to it now. You have the access to it. So slowly by slowly, we're going to start working on it. Yeah. I mean, we've already started putting in assets, we've already started doing stuff, we're starting to learn the software better and the back end of it. And also Nvidia is updating it like on a weekly basis. So, um. More and more stuff's becoming accessible. Um you have they have web sockets now for um in kit, so you can actually um live stream, like you can link assets onto your website from Omniverse. Um, you know, they're just they're adding so much stuff all the time, so it's it's pretty cool. Okay. Well, I think we should wrap that up because that's part one. Yes. That's what we think Omniverse is, what we think we can use it, what we want to do with it. Um and I hopefully part two comes next week when, you know, the Mike comes and says, well, Yeah. Yeah. Probably not. Um. Yeah. Probably not. And then. Yeah. Um. So, um. Yeah, so things look forward to. We're still wanting to expand the discussion today. With Mike. Um maybe you can take a listen to today to today's episode and correct us on everything we got wrong. Yeah. About Omniverse or even pass us on the back. Because who knows, we may have discovered something new and a cool. Cool new use case. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know how smart we are. Maybe. Yeah. And then just a quick review, the cleat adjusters page are live, they're getting updated with more instructions on how to use them. Um including measuring your foot angle, etcetera. Yep. And uh that that's it. Is there anything else you want to add? No, um we're working on that, we're working on the manuals and then we're also working on building out a uh little support system on our website. So we can answer more like frequently asked questions. and um more instructions on like, you know, bottle cages, um and and um uh cleat adapters and all that kind of stuff. So we're working on it. Okay, well. We thank you for choosing to take some time with us and we look forward to future breakaways. Look for us on Instagram and LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and in person here in Tennessee. We ask our listeners to please share it, like and subscribe. We're available on all major streaming platforms. Thanks for listening. Have a good one and find some time to break away.
EpisodeMay 5, 2021 · 30:43
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Project Breakaway with Predator Cycling
20: Welcome to the Omniverse, Ep. 20
Hosts Courtney and Arm introduce Nvidia Omniverse, a 3D simulation and collaboration platform they liken to a "design multiverse" for various software tools. They explore its potential to integrate Predator Cycling's diverse design applications (CAD, Rhino, Fusion) into a unified virtual workspace. This innovative platform could revolutionize their workflow by enabling real-time collaboration and asset management for their bicycle and machine part designs.
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