ZED Isaac™ Sim Extension Overview

Build, test, and train your physical AI before the hardware even exists.

The ZED Camera extension brings faithful digital twins of every ZED camera into NVIDIA® Isaac™ Sim’s photorealistic simulation. Your simulated ZED streams data to the ZED SDK exactly like a real camera would, so the exact software you ship (perception, navigation, your ROS 2 stack) runs unchanged against the simulator. Iterate on your robot in a fully repeatable virtual world, then deploy to the field with confidence.

What you get:

• ✅ Every ZED camera as a calibrated digital twin: stereo and mono models, with their lens variants
• ✅ Stereo images + IMU streamed to the ZED SDK and ZED ROS 2 Wrapper, with zero code change
• ✅ Ground-truth depth streaming, straight into your ZED SDK pipeline
• ✅ ZED Sim2Real, a model of the real ZED X camera on top of the clean render: its auto exposure, white balance, noise, motion blur and lens
• ✅ ZED observations as GPU tensors in Isaac™ Lab, for reinforcement & imitation learning
• ✅ SDK-free RGB + depth capture for quick synthetic datasets
• ✅ Multi-camera streaming: several cameras on one robot or several robots in one scene, stereo and mono mixed, all streaming simultaneously
• ✅ Low-latency IPC streaming and virtual stereo pairs

Why simulate your ZED?

Left: real ZED X. Middle: raw Isaac™ Sim render. Right: the same render with the ZED Sim2Real model applied.

Choosing a data path

Whatever your workflow (sim-to-real validation, robot learning, or dataset generation), there is a data path for it:

Get started

Get your first simulated ZED streaming in a few steps: install Isaac™ Sim, the ZED SDK, and the ZED Camera extension, then drop a ZED into your scene and press Play.