NVIDIA Developing its Own Holodeck

NVIDIA quietly revealed it is developing its own Holodeck. Or, at least, it’s borrowing the name of Star Trek’s immersive simulation technology. To facilitate its Project Holodeck – a photorealistic VR platform – NVIDIA is inviting enterprise partners to develop 3D designs in VR. As such, the company is taking early access applications now.  In fact, NVIDIA is already working with NASA and sports car manufacturer Koenigsegg.

NVIDIA’s Holodeck

The collaborative VR project aims to develop photorealistic VR with a real-world presence, including haptics (i.e. touch). NVIDIA describes it thusly:

The Holodeck environment allows creators to import high-fidelity, full-resolution models into VR to collaborate and share with colleagues or friends — and make design decisions easier and faster.

Holodeck is built on an enhanced version of Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 and includes NVIDIA GameWorks, VRWorks and DesignWorks, delivering unparalleled photorealism, and physics simulation in collaborative virtual reality.

Holodeck is an effort rooted in decades of work. And it shows:

• You’ll import and interact with highly complex, detailed models consisting of tens of millions of polygons, beautiful materials, and textures, thanks to state-of-the-art rendering techniques optimized for real-time VR using NVIDIA DesignWorks and VRWorks.
• You’ll work in an environment that not only looks real, but feels real, thanks to the suite of tools, such as NVIDIA PhysX, we built to help VR developers create amazing virtual worlds that obey the laws of physics.

Required Hardware

To develop for the project, designers need to create 3D models in May or 3dsMax. To support this, though, designers need to be running at least a GeForce 1080 Ti. However, a TITAN Xp or Quadro P6000 is preferable.