EVIS: A Physics-Grounded Event Camera Plugin for NVIDIA Isaac Sim
For robotics researchers needing labeled event-camera data, EVIS provides a practical simulation tool that reduces data collection costs and accelerates development of event-based perception and control.
EVIS is a physics-grounded event camera plugin for NVIDIA Isaac Sim that generates high-rate, fully labeled event streams, enabling real-time generation on a single GPU through interpolation. It bridges the gap between simulated and real event data for robotics applications.
Event cameras offer microsecond temporal resolution, low latency, and high dynamic range, making them attractive for robotics. However, labeled event-camera data for a specific robot and scene is scarce and expensive to collect, which slows the development of event-based perception and control. We present EVIS: a physics-grounded event camera plugin for NVIDIA Isaac Sim that generates high-rate, fully labeled event streams directly inside a physics simulator. The plugin implements a faithful log-intensity contrast event model with per-pixel asynchronous reference updates; it migrates from a normal RGB camera with few changes and integrates into any Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab scene, inheriting the simulator's physics and frame-perfect ground truth. It is fully configurable, and offers an interpolation option that renders only sparse keyframes and synthesizes the in-between frames through bidirectional motion-vector warping, making real-time generation on a single GPU possible. Optional sensor noise and motion blur further narrow the gap to real cameras. The generated streams are directly usable by pretrained event networks for downstream tasks. Code repository: https://github.com/spikelab-jhu/isaac-sim-event-camera-plugin