Siemens Launches Immersive Engineering Innovations

Siemens' latest innovations, launched at CES 2024, combine the real and digital worlds. Siemens announced new partnerships and breakthroughs in AI and immersive engineering to enable the industrial metaverse, while using its open digital business platform, Siemens Xcelerator.

“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,” says Siemens CEO Roland Busch. “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." 

“Siemens is making the industrial metaverse more accessible so that our customers can use it to solve their real-world problems faster, more sustainably and with greater efficiency—and we will make it available to companies of all sizes, so that everybody can turn their big ideas into world-changing innovations,” says Cedrik Neike, member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and CEO of Siemens Digital Industries.

Siemens and Sony partnership

Siemens and Sony Corp. are partnering to introduce a solution that combines the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio of industry software with Sony’s new spatial content creation system, featuring the XR head-mounted display with high-quality 4K OLED Microdisplays and controllers for intuitive interaction with 3D objects. Enabling designers and engineers to create and explore design concepts in a borderless immersive workspace, 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’ product engineering solution. 

“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," says Yoshinori Matsumoto, executive deputy president and officer, Technology and Incubation, Sony. 

In related news, Siemens and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are strengthening their partnership to build and scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Siemens is integrating Amazon Bedrock—a service that offers a choice of foundation models from leading AI companies via a single application programming interface, along with security, privacy and responsible AI capabilities—with Mendix, a low-code platform that is part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio.

“By integrating Amazon Bedrock into our low-code platform, we are democratizing generative AI technology and empowering everyone to create the applications customers need to become more competitive, resilient, and sustainable,” says Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens. “Making smarter applications without programming expertise accelerates innovation and helps companies to tackle skilled labor shortages.”

“Together, AWS and Siemens are empowering companies worldwide to create new capabilities, solutions, and value with generative AI,” says Adam Selipsky, AWS CEO. “This partnership builds on our 10-year relationship with Siemens, giving customers across all industries the flexible, customizable, secure environment they need to take advantage of new opportunities with generative AI.”

The combination will enable customers to select the generative AI model that best suits their specific use case and quickly and securely incorporate that model into their applications. This will make their development simpler, faster, and more efficient. Previously, when developers wanted to integrate generative AI models, they had to obtain access credentials, and write specialized function code. With the new Mendix-Amazon Bedrock integration, this can now be done with a few clicks. Teams can create smart applications without dedicated programming knowledge and users can interact with information easily via a graphical interface and the simplicity of drag-and-drop commands.

Growing Siemens Xcelerator Ecosystem

Alongside the visitor experience at CES 2024, Siemens is presenting opportunities for customers, partners and developers with the Siemens Xcelerator Developer Experience. With the launch of its Siemens Xcelerator Developer Portal, Siemens is delivering a platform consolidating all Siemens’ APIs and developer resources. This portal, part of Siemens Xcelerator, operates on principles of openness and collaboration, providing developers a unified space to explore and access Siemens and partner APIs.

In collaboration with Microsoft, the developer portal introduces a Chatbot, offering an AI companion to enhance the development experience. The Siemens Xcelerator Developer Portal ensures a streamlined and developer-friendly journey from discovery to deployment.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.