Tag Archives: SteamVR

HTC Vive Development & Training Program Available Now

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Taipei, 5 August 2016 – HTC, creator of the HTC Vive, the most advanced virtual reality system on the market, today announced that it will begin working with third party developers and hardware makers to expand the accessories and peripherals ecosystem for the HTC Vive.

HTC will hold in-person training courses in Asia to complement the courses being provided in the US by Valve and Synapse. These training courses will provide development resources, software for developing tracked accessories and peripherals, technical support for integration, and go-to-market resources when their products are ready. The program is expected to facilitate rapid development of innovative hardware solutions to create new ways for people to interact with their virtual world.

At this early stage in the development of the VR ecosystem, the whole industry must work together to overcome the barriers to ubiquitous adoption of VR. By enabling third party developers to create accessories and peripherals, HTC is allowing the industry to create high quality products much faster. And because of HTC Vive’s position as market leader in the VR space, hardware partners will have access to a large installed base of existing customers, channels and content.

“We are extremely excited about the potential mid- to long-term impact of our decision with our partner Valve to simultaneously open up our respective technologies in order to accelerate growth in the VR industry,” said Cher Wang, Chairwoman and CEO of HTC. “The new wave of innovation this program will enable is going to be amazing to watch, the biggest winners will be the consumers and business customers around the world.”

Alan Yates, Valve Engineer, said “Making this OpenVR tracking technology available to more partners is an extremely important step in the evolution of virtual reality and 3D tracking. We are very confident that doing so will result in new and innovative experiences for all VR customers.”

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NVIDIA Iray VR Introduces Interactive Photorealism

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by Phil Miller

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on Tuesday showed how our Iray technology can create interactive virtual worlds with unparalleled fidelity.

Imagine being able to see any combination of options for a car interior you’re thinking of buying — in photorealistic detail — and from any angle. Or being able to experience the feeling of a new building’s interior — from any corner of a room — before it’s built.

Iray VR capabilities will allow us to create environments that let users strap on a headset and peer around photorealistic virtual environments. With Iray VR, you’ll be able to look around the inside of a virtual car, a modern loft, or the interior of our still unfinished Silicon Valley campus with uncanny accuracy.

“It’s utterly beautiful,” said Huang during a keynote address at our GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif., as he showed attendees still-to-be constructed interiors of the campus. “Iray VR is going to be unbelievable for people designing cars, for people architecting buildings and many other areas.”

Yet despite their realism, none of these environments exist outside of our computer models.

It’s the next step with our Iray technology, which taps into the power of our GPUs to let users quickly generate immersive experiences of their designs with amazing accuracy.

 

Iray Brings Reality to Virtual Reality

[adrotate banner=”4″]Iray lets users refine their designs faster thanks to its host of rendering capabilities, such as interactive ray tracing, the ability to accurately represent materials, and scaling from desktop to datacenter. These capabilities have made Iray an indispensable tool for designers and will become essential for realistic virtual experiences.

In particular, Iray has proven itself to architects and lighting designers, who are using its capabilities to model how light interacts with their designs at any time of day, and any day of the year.

Attendees at our GTC conference, taking place now at the San Jose Convention Center, can experience the full Iray VR experience in our booth in the VR Village. Look for more details on the availability of Iray VR capabilities later this spring.

 

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SteamVR Performance Tool Released

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The weekend’s tech news has been all about the HTC Vive : we have heard about its $799 price tag, and that pre-orders will start on 2/29. Valve has released the very first VR Performance Test that gives end users a way to figure out: is my system ready for SteamVR?

 

SteamVR Performance Tool

This app features high quality VR content from the Aperture Science Robot Repair demo, designed specifically for the HTC Vive, though it can be run on any PC and does not require a headset to be connected to the system. It’s available for anyone to download and test their system.

In short: the test employs a technique called dynamic fidelity, which automatically adjusts image quality as required to avoid dropped frames that can break the sense of presence critical to VR experiences. CPU and GPU hardware is then assigned one of three categories (VR Recommended, VR Capable, or VR Not Ready) based on the average fidelity level attained.

 

Recommended For VR

We’re very pleased to let you know that all our Radeon R9 390 series and Fury series products, including the R9 Nano can achieve the highest attainable status: ‘Recommended for VR’. This performance is a validation of the work AMD has done with Valve and other technology partners to deliver the best VR experiences with our products through the LiquidVR initiative.

Below is a small chart summarizing the results by GPUs with system configuration details, should you need a reference point in running the benchmark yourself.

As you can see and verify for yourself, Radeon R9 products are perfectly positioned to deliver superior VR experiences for the HTC Vive headset– whether you choose the R9 390 or opt for a true enthusiast product like the R9 Fury, AMD Radeons are in a position to deliver a better VR experience than their direct competitors for this headset

[adrotate banner=”4″]We’re especially proud of the Radeon R9 Nano’s performance in this VR test that is unmatched at its mini-ITX form factor. There’s also a wider selection of Radeons currently available that are capable of attaining the ‘Recommended for VR’ status than the competition’s offerings.

What’s more, we’ve worked very closely with Valve to implement one of AMD LiquidVR’s premier features called Affinity multi-GPU into the Aperture Science Robot Repair demo, which this tool is based on . Think of this as CrossFire technology for VR, where the application lets one GPU render for the left eye, and the other for the right eye. Though the work implementing Affinity mGPU into this application is not finished, it’s already showing significant performance uplift over a single GPU.

We’re very excited about the HTC Vive and SteamVR experience. We’re also thrilled to bring exceptional VR capability not only to millions of Radeon users who can rest assured that their GPUs are ready to drive the HTC Vive headset, but also to those thinking about buying one of the above-mentioned cards to power a premium VR-Ready experience.

 

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