Nvidia is expanding the capabilities of its VRworks toolkit to streamline the development process.
The tech company revealed its new VRWorks audio and 360-degree video software development kits today. As part of the company’s presence at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, Nvidia showed off how the VRWorks Audio SDK can do real-time calculations for audio positioning in a 3D virtual environment. Nvidia also launched a VRWorks Audio plugin for Epic Games’ popular Unreal Engine 4 toolkit. Additionally, Nvidia announced that its VRWorks 360 Video SDK can stitch together eight 4K cameras instantly into a stereo 360-degree stream.
For the audio tech, this enables realistic sound in 3D spaces. As you walk around an environment, sounds will take on different characteristics based on the surrounding objects. Nvidia also points out that its VRWorks Audio SDK builds the acoustic model of a polygonal space instantly without needing any extra information.
That kind of audio is crucial for VR because sound is one of those elements of a virtual world that you don’t think about unless it’s wrong. If you are expecting a space to produce echoes and reverb, and instead you get flat audio, you’ll probably notice that — and it could take you out of the experience.
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When it comes to 360-degree video, Nvidia’s rendering power could enable easy 360-degree livestreams. If you have two of Nvidia’s powerful professional-grade Quadro P6000 graphics cards, the VRWorks software can process an array of 4K inputs into one, stitched-together video.
“The fact that NVIDIA manages to stitch 4K 360 stereoscopic video in real time, making livestreaming possible, changes the production pipeline and enables entirely new use cases in VR,” Z Cam chief executive Kinson Loo said.
Loo’s Z Cam makes a 360-video camera rig that can now use Nvidia’s tech to get instant results from a shoot instead of having to wait for a rig to render the results.
