NVIDIA Opens Up Its Holodeck VR Design Suite

One company looks to revolutionize design by combining virtual reality with the collaborative efforts of innovators. 

NVIDIA unveiled its exciting visualization platform suite, which includes haptics, multi-user collaboration, photorealistic graphics and even real-world physics. The benefits for manufacturers are many: engineers and design teams can be trained differently. Efficiency will improve and collaboration will be enhanced in the automotive industry.

Holodeck is a truly hybrid platform, based on a version of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 and the VRWorks, DesignWorks and Game Works packages. Additional software, perhaps a Quadro P600, NVIDIA 1080 Ti or Titan XP GPU, could be needed, but most likely a simpler suite of software will used. Headsets are also a question mark.

All of this sounds very promising, and the company is well aware of the fact that small adjustments will need to be made to an already well-performing platform. This is another reason why the NVIDIA’s spirit of always creating a community of users who will offer fair and open criticism is so important for continuing to improve.

The true aim, of course, is creative collaboration. Designers will be able to model and interact with robots, people, and objects, all of this carried out in real time.

It was first announced in May by CEO and founder Jensen Huang at the GPU Technology Conference, where he gave a demo of the VR platform using the Koenigsegg Supercar. A preview of the suite that was later introduced, it showed the full capabilities of VR and its practical applications.

Dave Shubmehl, Research Director and Lead Analyst IDC Cognitive Systems and Content Analysis Research, voiced his strong support for the company’s efforts:

“NVIDIA’s GTC highlighted the ways that deep learning is being used to solve an ever-wider range of challenges,” adding about its larger impact on industry, “Going forward, deep learning will be an integral component of almost every enterprise and consumer application and will affect everyone daily…Intelligent applications based on cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, and deep learning are the next wave of technology transforming how consumers and enterprises work, learn, and play."

This means that the company is providing a crucial roadmap that will assist enterprises in using VR and AR technology capabilites in a way that can be more profitable. This represents a fundamental shift towards a company-centered approach, as opposed to the consumer-centered approach that was used when the technology was still in its infancy.

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The biggest asset for NVIDIA is that it is a company that’s always made efforts to actively encourage the participation of the community through its bold initiatives, with the concept of seeking out “achievement-oriented, innovative, passionate, and collaborative people to help tackle the world's most challenging problems in visual computing.” With the same mission, it has invited a small number of developers and designers to take part in this exciting new initiative.

NVIDIA is truly on the vanguard of virtual reality and has made wise efforts to move the technology out of the area of gaming, entertainment, sports and travelling, and into the realm of design, innovation and engineering.