Varjo is a Finnish-based provider of enterprise-grade mixed reality (MR) headsets and has seen industry-wide success of its XR-3 headset.
Varjo’s Reality Cloud Service is a new software solution unveiled during the company’s “A New World Awaits” announcement video.
The in-house project has taken years to realise, and investors have offered a vital capital boost after of over $100 million from investors, including significant funds from Swedish automotive firm Volvo.
What is it?
Varjo Reality Cloud uses the XR-3 headset to create and stream digital twins of a user’s environment for others to visit.
The digital twins are created with outward facing cameras embedded in the XR-3 headset along with built-in Lidar scanners, which turn surroundings into real-time and customisable 3D renders.
Despite the high quality renders, the streams are incredibly compact, being made up of only 10 to 30 megabits, or less than a Netflix movie stream.
Urho Konttori, Varjo CTO said: “It’s super important that the latency is kept low enough so that you have you feel that the interaction is logical, and that you don’t have like motion-related latency”
Touted as “virtual teleportation,” the stream will act as a metaverse for multiple users to join.
A metaverse is a shared virtual space and analysts have held many discussions about the value of metaverses for enterprises.
Virbela and Spatial are metaverses that give a safe virtual workplace for enterprises, and this saw an increase in interest due to Covid-19.
Who is it for?
Logging into the Metaverse means offices and colleges will be in a shared virtual place and there is no need for a physical workplace.
Augmented reality (AR) workplaces are becoming more popular as firms digitally transform, with many firms seeing improvements to workplace efficacy through the use of AR smartglasses such as the Microsoft Hololens 2.
Varjo CEO Timo Toikkanen said in a recent interview,
“It really does change things in a big way. Both for businesses as well as for private individuals. You can teleport to other people, to your family, or you can teleport to a work project”
The firm also recently appointed former DreamWorks CTO Lincoln Wallen to the board of directors to help the company transition its services to the cloud.
Users of the new cloud service can now work across multiple desktop and mobile devices to see through the streamers point of view.
Varjo Reality Cloud will be initially available for the Varjo X-3 headset, with further plans to have the software available on other headsets.
