At today’s GTC Europe conference in Munich, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced an Early Access program for Holodeck, their photorealistic, collaborative VR viewer. Described as the “design lab of the future”, Nvidia Holodeck aims to provide a highly immersive platform for industrial design and development.
Update (10/10/2017): Initially revealed as ‘Project Holodeck’ at GTC San Jose in May, a virtual Koenigsegg Regera vehicle was observed and discussed by multiple viewers, including the founder of the company Christian von Koenigsegg, in a real-time, collaborative VR environment.
Today, a similar demonstration took place at the GTC Europe keynote in Munich, this time involving a virtual McLaren 720S. Multiple collaborators from different locations joined in the same virtual space, represented as humanoid avatars. Huang drew attention to four pillars of the platform – photorealistic models, physics and haptics simulation, team collaboration, and GPU-accelerated AI. Nvidia Holodeck is already being used to train robots as part of the Nvidia Isaac Lab.
Holodeck Early Access applications are now open, with initial support for importing models from 3dsMax and Maya. The plugin architecture means that Nvidia Holodeck should eventually integrate with most industry standard CAD formats/workflows.
For further information, visit Nvidia’s Holodeck web page.
Original article (5/24/17): At this month’s GPU Technology Conference 2017, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang opened with a live demonstration of ‘Project Holodeck’, a VR collaboration tool with rich visuals, partnering with Swedish car manufacturer Koenigsegg to show off a detailed CAD model of one of their vehicles. Early access to the tool will be available this September.
On stage at the event’s keynote, Huang presented Nvidia’s interpretation of a ‘holodeck’, with its three pillars of: photorealistic models, interactive physics, and collaboration. Christian von Koenigsegg, founder of Swedish high-performance car manufacturer Koenigsegg, was speaking live from a VR headset in Sweden, and gave a virtual tour of his Regera hypercar, along with a few of his employees. You can see a video of Project Holodeck in action heading this article.
While the avatars were styled as humanoid robots, the movement was based on the VR headset and controller tracking data, and as he described the car in his typically eloquent fashion, Christian’s distinctive mannerisms were easily recognisable.
The interior of the car was also shown briefly, and one operator placed their virtual hands realistically on the steering wheel, and another ran their fingers down the dashboard, showing accurate real-time physics at work, with no unnatural clipping.
Afterwards, some deliberate clipping was shown as the car model was cut away, revealing a highly-detailed chassis under the skin, thanks to the real CAD data supplied by Koenigsegg. Finally, the car was ‘exploded’ into thousands of component parts, all rendered remarkably high quality.
Nvidia says that Project Holodeck “makes it easy to import and beautifully render enormous models without geometric simplification. In the case of the Koenigsegg car, the model was a jaw-dropping 50 million polygons. This means creators can skip the time spent simplifying their models for VR, and spend more time exploring them at full fidelity.”
