HTC VIVE has announced that the upcoming VIVE Pro Eye has been recognized as the preferred VR headset (HMD) for NVIDIA’s Variable Rate Shading (VRS) technology. Announced in January 2019, the Vive Pro Eye was created to meet the demands of professional VR users. With the inclusion of eye tracking, Vive Pro Eye will allow developers to gather more data about their product development and design environments, help optimize computer and VR performance, and provide deeper levels of training. Vive Pro Eye also enables new levels of convenience, including gaze-oriented menu navigation, and removing the need for controllers for environments such as VR arcades or location-based entertainment.
“We’re continuing to see enterprise VR demands evolve, and Vive is meeting these demands for more toolsets within the headset,” Daniel O’Brien, GM Americas, HTC VIVE. “Coupled with NVIDIA VRS, integrated eye tracking in the new Vive Pro Eye delivers a host of features to take enterprise and location-based VR to an unprecedented level of impact, rapidly evolving what enterprise users can do in VR.”
To aid developers in quickly implementing eye tracking into their VR projects, Vive today also released an updated “Pro Eye SDK,” which directly integrates VRS for foveated rendering. The Vive Pro Eye SDK (SRAnipal) is available on the HTC Vive developer portal.
First-of-its-kind Audi Design Review at GTC
Powering the most expansive VR demo at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC), Vive is truly immersing users within NVIDIA Holodeck to experience an Audi design review that features the vehicle fully recreated within the program. Design reviews within VR are immensely impactful because they allow businesses and developers to view objects at scale, accelerate design review, validate with more precision and improve communication between local and global teams.
The experience is using the Vive Wireless Adaptor, giving participants true freedom of movement within VR. This first-of-its-kind experience allows users to walk fully around the Audi vehicle — instead of teleporting within VR. The experience also features mixed reality cameras attached to large monitors so attendees can see the demo participants engage with the vehicle in a virtual environment.
Vive Pro Eye Featured at GTC
Powered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs, the Vive Pro Eye is delivering compelling enterprise demonstrations at GTC. NVIDIA VR Ready Quadro GPUs provide the capabilities essential for high-fidelity VR experiences across professional applications. When combined, the Vive Pro Eye and Quadro GPUs deliver the performance, stability and reliability necessary for an enterprise-grade experience.
“Vive is among the best VR headsets available for professional users, and Vive Pro Eye takes it to the next level,” said David Weinstein, Director of VR, NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA VRS technology, users can now derive the benefits of foveated rendering and super-sampling to deliver the highest quality of visualization while increasing computing efficiency.”
The Vive booths at GTC feature innovative enterprise experiences from Zerolight, Gravity Sketch, Ovation, Autodesk, Lockheed Martin’s Prepar3D, and FLAIM Trainer, among others.
As a global leader in the aerospace industry, Lockheed Martin created pioneering simulation software for private pilots, commercial organizations, militaries, and academia with Prepar3D®, which now incorporates Vive Pro Eye. This next generation training, available worldwide, can provide eye-tracking data to an instructor to offer insights into a student’s performance while the student is immersed in a virtual reality flight training scenario.
“Prepar3D combines the most realistic simulation with the latest VR hardware improvements for an effective and efficient training experience,” said Adam Breed, Lockheed Martin Prepar3D’s engineering project manager. “Across our military and commercial community, we are seeing exciting progress in pilot learning as students can better evaluate and learn from their decisions with the insight provided through built-in eye tracking.”
In business, public speaking skills are essential to development, but gaining experience can be difficult and intimidating for beginners. Ovation eliminates these and many other traditional obstacles by harnessing the power of virtual reality. The VR experience allows users to customize their training to replicate real-life situations from ballroom to courtroom, in addition to using eye tracking data that provides feedback designed to grow users’ skills and confidence.
“Arguably the most important element of communication is eye contact; with the Vive Pro Eye, Ovation can now actively guide improvement by measuring and providing feedback on where exactly users are distributing their eye contact throughout a speech,” said Jeff Marshall, CEO, Ovation. “Our virtual venues come to life as individual audience members can now react with various animations when a user makes direct eye contact with them. Further, optimizations enabled by VRS allow us to pack in even more functionality and realism while ensuring a smooth experience in the headset. As a developer, there’s just no going back once you’ve seen all that eye tracking makes possible.”
Vive Pro Eye at Laval Virtual
Vive Pro Eye will also feature this week at Laval Virtual in France – Europe’s largest trade show dedicated to VR and AR. The BMW M Virtual Experience, developed by ZeroLight with Nvidia and HTC Vive, will be displayed on the Immersion booth. The experience enables potential customers to configure, explore, and sit inside their digital vehicle on a 1:1 scale. The demo, which was first unveiled at CES 2019, showcases how image quality can be enhanced through foveated rendering – a method of rendering that uses eye-tracking technology to focus compute power on exactly where the user is looking. In doing so, the area of the display that’s in use receives the best possible image, while areas that aren’t in use are de-prioritised. NVIDIA Turing-based RTX™ GPUs provide the best solution for foveated rendering through variable rate shading (VRS), enabling super sampling within a target area. The experience also uses Vive Pro Eye’s eye-tracking technology to track interactions in real time, enabling ZeroLight’s Wisdom VR platform to deliver intelligent insights into individual and aggregated user behaviour and preferences.
For more on Vive Enterprise, please visit: www.enterprise.vive.com.
