Mixed reality (MR) solutions provider Varjo announced on Tuesday its support for NVIDIA’s Omniverse and Open Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) interoperability plans.
With the two companies working together, the Helsinki, Finland-based extended reality (XR) firm will leverage NVIDIA’s industry-leading technologies to support applications with photorealistic, real-time ray-tracing.
Marcus Olssen, Director of Software Partnerships, Varjo, called real-time ray tracing “the holy grail of 3D visualizations.”
He explained further,
“Graphical and computing demands made it impossible to ray trace true-to-life scenes like these in high-resolution VR until now. With support for NVIDIA Omniverse, mixed reality developers and users will have the ability to render photorealistic scenes in Varjo XR-3 and unlock ray tracing in mixed reality.
Olssen continued that NVIDIA’s next-generation multi-graphics processor unit (GPU) configurations could easily scale rendering pipelines for Varjo’s products.
By combining Varjo’s human-eye resolution hardware with the Omniverse’s ray-tracing proficiencies and GPUs, developers across industry verticals can access ‘game-changing’ tools for the enterprise, he said.
Olssen concluded: “The combination of Varjo’s human-eye resolution hardware with the Omniverse platform’s ray-tracing capabilities and next-generation GPUs is a game-changer for mixed reality developers in design, engineering, entertainment, and virtual collaboration.”
Next-Level Ray Tracing for the Enterprise
Varjo’s XR-3 headsets can produce ray-tracing effects for huge MR data visualisation and environments with the upgraded Omniverse.
These can contain millions of polygons, massive lighting effects, and photorealistic physical materials. With NVIDIA, developers and content creators no longer require long waiting periods to render files.
The XR3, the most advanced MR headset on the market, will also back retinal resolution Quad View rendering on the Omniverse. The device, which boasts more than 60 pixels per degree (PPD), can merge high-resolution and low-resolution views to boost visual fidelity.
Teams using Quad View rendering can also use the Omniverse to access NVIDIA’s RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs, the most advanced in history at an unprecedented 15 million pixels.
In June, automakers such as General Motors have already piloted unrivalled solutions at the Augmented World Expo (AWE 2023). Both Varjo’s and NVIDIA’s latest disruptive technologies showcased immersive tools for the industrial metaverse and XR, leading to a major milestone in the immersive market.
The news comes after Varjo secured $40 million in funding to build industrial metaverse technologies. This has led to the creation of its own Reality Cloud platform, used by US automaker Rivian, and Varjo Teleport.
The latter can import volumetrically captured visuals from real-world environments to create immersive spaces, using hardware from VR-3 and XR-3 headsets.
NVIDIA’s Omniverse Takes Centre Stage at SIGGRAPH 2023
At the SIGGRAPH 2023 event in Los Angeles, NVIDIA broke the news of its CloudXR and Omniverse upgrades in a massive keynote, debuting a series of upgrades, products, and support for OpenXR and OpenUSD file formats.
Companies such as Swedish telecoms giant Ericsson and Chinese electric vehicle automaker BYD will become the first to use the upgraded platform, Huang noted in his speech.
The SIGGRAPH 2023 event is taking place from 6 to 10 August at the Los Angeles Convention Center, uniting thousands of industry professionals for the world’s premier computer vision conference. Numerous tech giants have joined the event, including Meta Platforms, Unity, NVIDIA, Adobe, Vicon, and many others.
