Breakthroughs in content creation may have once been drawn up on a chalkboard. But today’s 3D tech requires something a little more technological—like the “digital twin” capabilities of Siemens’ Xcelerator industrial software.

So it’s not surprising that Sony Corporation has partnered with Plano-based Siemens Industry Software to combine the Xcelerator portfolio with Sony’s new XR head-mounted display, which was designed using Siemens’ NX software. Siemens calls NX “a core solution used across Sony to design its industry leading products.”

This week in Las Vegas, Seiya Amatatsu, the head of Sony’s XR Technology Development Division, spoke about the partnership at Siemens’ Realize LIVE digital transformation conference. 

Amatatsu recounted how his team relies on the NX software to help develop an “immersive spatial content creation system” featuring “an XR head-mounted display with high-quality 4K OLED Microdisplays and controllers for intuitive interaction with 3D objects.”

“Sony succeeded in implementing NX in the fastest schedule in the world and we were able to improve our design process productivity by 25%,” Amatatsu said. “Although significant advancements have been made with NX, I wanted to achieve further evolution with a product that brings innovations allowing direct editing in an immersive environment. I believed that could be realized with Siemens and as a result, the XR head-mounted display was developed that could bring innovative products to market more rapidly.”

Photo: Sony Corporation

Allows creators ‘to craft in virtual space’

The spatial content creation system will enable “real-time, high-definition, and realistic rendering of textures of 3D objects and facial expressions of human characters” for content like movies, video games, and industrial design, Sony said in January. The solution allows creators “to craft in virtual space with controllers and keyboards, all while wearing the head-mounted display,” Sony added.

Siemens’ NX Immersive Designer, slated to launch at the end of 2024, combines Siemens’ NX product engineering software exclusively with Sony’s XR tech.

Sony said the solution’s “powerful hardware and software” will empower creators in industrial design and product engineering field by providing “more immersive design, review, and collaboration tools.”

“At Sony, we’re committed to creators. In every line of our business, we want to enable creators to create, and the SRH-S1 does just that,” Hirohito Kondo, Deputy GM of XR business development for Sony product management, said in a statement. “Our head-mounted display and dedicated controllers lets you create more intuitively in a fully immersive environment, allowing you to move freely between the virtual and real worlds—collaborating and creating with colleagues around the world in real time—and it will enable more innovation.”

‘Meaningful hands-on engineering’

‘The tight integration of the hardware and software gives designers and engineers all new, incredibly natural ways to interact with the Digital Twin,” Kondo added. “And that interaction is the key. We’re not just viewing designs. This is about doing meaningful hands-on engineering. That is why the image quality is so important—as well as the precision of the controls and even the comfort of the headset—because together, it lets you collaborate more, engineer better, and innovate faster. It lets you do real, meaningful engineering—and without ever having to build a physical prototype.”

Sony has been using the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio as its primary product engineering software since 2015, “at an accelerated pace,” noted Siemens.

Siemens’ NX Immersive Designer is expected to launch at the end of 2024. You can see the solution at work in a video posted here.

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