Vircadia vs. Omniverse
Nvidia Omniverse is a full-featured AI powered development platform for enterprise. It assists with the creation of games, real-time environments, and virtual worlds.
Vircadia is an open source metaverse platform designed for the creation and deployment of games, environments, and virtual worlds for all industries, from education and enterprise to non-profits and government organizations.
Both Vircadia and Omniverse enable optimized workflows for the creation of virtual worlds, however only Vircadia maintains a full pipeline for deployment of those creations for public and private use through the web or native applications.
Developers's Platform vs End-to-End Creator's Platform​
Omniverse utilizes USD (Universal Scene Description) as its primary way of structuring a scene. This format is not currently common, but has the potential to become an industry standard in the future. Omniverse's tooling allows developers to develop complex and high quality scenes in an optimized pipeline.
Vircadia utilizes glTF (GL Transmission Format) as its primary way of importing and exporting assets and scenes. This format is extremely common and is the industry standard for 3D models alongside the FBX format. Support for USD (Universal Scene Description) is scheduled to be added in a future version of Vircadia as an import/export format for scenes.
Both platforms encourage real-time collaborative creation of worlds. However, Omniverse is a "developer's platform", whereas Vircadia is an "end-to-end creator's platform". Vircadia allows for all aspects (models, scripts, etc.) of a real-time production world to be edited collaboratively by administrators (and guests if desired).
License & Pricing​
Nvidia Omniverse is a premium toolkit for designing and developing components for 3D products. It is however closed source and requires continued licensing for many of its features. Also, due to its proprietary nature, if Nvidia decides to stop developing Omniverse, the cost and burden of migrating to a new development pipeline is borne by the user.
Vircadia however uses the Apache 2.0 open source license which is a good benefit to project security as it helps ensure that your organization can maintain its copy of the code even if the maintainer stops supporting it. It also has the added benefit of being able to keep all code changes closed source if desired. This allows organizations to maintain a competitive advantage or heightened code-security.
Deployment​
Omniverse is designed as a collaborative development platform first and foremost, where mass-user distribution is meant to be handled in separate steps. Vircadia differs in the way that it encourages collaborative editing and production deployment of UX friendly worlds, enabling an end-to-end workflow in a completely free and open source environment.