Welcome to UrbanVerse!#

Note: This documentation is fully anonymized for double-blind review. All external links and identity-related content have been removed or replaced with anonymized placeholders.
Note: To view video demos and real-world results, please visit our anonymous project page: https://anonymoususeruseanonymousname.github.io/

UrbanVerse#

UrbanVerse is a unified real-to-sim system built on the UrbanVerse platform with Nvidia IsaacLab as the simulation engine for robot learning in urban environments. It converts casually captured, uncalibrated city-tour videos into fully interactive simulation scenes, enabling users to build realistic, layout-accurate environments and train their own robots at scale.

Core Components#

UrbanVerse is powered by two main modules:

  1. UrbanVerse-100K — a large-scale dataset of (a) Object Collection: 102,530 urban 3D assets across 667 categories, each annotated with 33 semantic, physical, and affordance attributes in true metric scale; (b) Ground Texture Collection: 288 4K photorealistic PBR materials (98 road, 190 sidewalk) for ground plane texturing; (c) Sky Collection: 306 4K HDRI sky maps for realistic global illumination and immersive 360° backgrounds.

  2. UrbanVerse-Gen — an automatic pipeline that extracts scene layouts from video and instantiates metric-scale simulations using retrieved assets.

Built-in Urban Simulation Environments#

We provide ready-to-use (pre-built) urban simulation environments for training and evaluation, each packaged as a standalone .usd file that can be directly loaded into the IsaacLab platform:

  1. UrbanVerse-160 — a collection of 160 pre-built environments reconstructed from city-tour videos across 7 continents, 24 countries, and 27 cities, available for training and validation.

  2. CraftBench — a suite of 10 high-fidelity urban scenes created by professional 3D artists, reserved exclusively for test-time evaluation.

Open-Source Release#

We will fully open-source the following UrbanVerse resources for the community, and we stand by this commitment:

Content

Platform

Format

Release Month

UrbanVerse-100K Asset Database

Hugging Face

.glb .json .jpg .mdl .hdr

January 2026

160 UrbanVerse Scenes

Hugging Face

.usd

January 2026

CraftBench Scenes

Hugging Face

.usd

January 2026

UrbanVerse-Gen Pipeline

GitHub

.py

February 2026

RL Training Scripts and Checkpoints

GitHub

.py .pt

February 2026

UrbanVerse-100K Annotation Tool

GitHub

.py

January 2026

Documentation & Tutorials

GitHub

.html

January 2026

User-Side Pipeline Overview#

The diagram below illustrates the complete user workflow in UrbanVerse, covering both custom scene generation and the use of built-in simulation scenes.

User-side pipeline for UrbanVerse

(A) Generate Your Own Simulation Scenes using UrbanVerse-Gen Automatica Pipeline#

  1. Input Preparation:

  • Accepts YouTube clips or URL, phone-recorded city-walk videos, pre-existing datasets, or folders of RGB frames (see Real-to-Sim Scene Generation with UrbanVerse-Gen for more details).

  • All inputs are normalized into sequential images for scene distillation.

  1. Run UrbanVerse-Gen Pipeline:

  • Generate your own simulation scenes using UrbanVerse-Gen APIs automatically (see Real-to-Sim Scene Generation with UrbanVerse-Gen for more details).

  • Extracts camera intrinsics/poses, metric depth, 3D instance point clouds, instance masks, and 3D boxes, producing a unified distilled scene graph (objects, ground, sky).

  • Materializes the scene graph by retrieving mutiple matched assets from UrbanVerse-100K (see Use UrbanVerse-100K with APIs for more details), including 3D GLB objects PBR ground materials, and HDRI sky maps.

  • Create and export fully interactivedigital-cousin simulation scenes in Isaac Sim with metric placement, physics, and lighting.

(B) Use Built-in Simulation UrbanVerse Repositories#

You can also directly use the built-in simulation UrbanVerse scene repositories we provided, including:

  1. UrbanVerse-160: A collection of 160 real-to-sim city scenes generated by UrbanVerse-Gen from city-tour YouTube videos acorss the world (See Use Built-in UrbanVerse Scenes for more details).

  2. CraftBench: A suite of 10 artist-crafted simulation scenes, useful for benchmarking policy robustness and generalization. (see Use Built-in CraftBench Scenes for more details).

(C) Leverage UrbanVerse Scenes for Downstream Applications#

Using either custom-generated scenes or built-in scene repositories, UrbanVerse supports:

  • Reinforcement Learning: Train navigation policies in UrbanVerse scenes using reinforcement learning (PPO) (see Reinforcement Learning in UrbanVerse for more details).

  • Expert Data Collection for Imitation Learning: Collect expert demonstrations from teleoperation (keyboard, joystick, gamepad, VR), and train behavior cloning policies (see Imitation Learning in UrbanVerse for more details).

  • Multimodal dataset collection: Collect offline multimodal dataset (RGB, depth, normals, segmentation, poses, etc) from UrbanVerse scenes for training and evaluation (see Collecting Data in UrbanVerse for more details).

  • Closed-loop evaluation: Evaluate the performance of the trained policies in UrbanVerse scenes (see Test Your Robots on CraftBench for more details).

  • Zero-shot Sim2Real deployment: Deploy the trained policies on real robot platforms (see Real-world Deployment: Unitree Go2 Quadruped Example for more details).

License#

This work, UrbanVerse, is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits sharing and adaptation with appropriate credit.

Table of Contents#

User Pipeline Overview