Nvidia is serious about VR, likely due to the fact PCs need advanced graphics cards like the company’s GTX series in order to run headsets. But it’s also doing a lot in other areas of the VR industry, including updating its VRWorks SDK.
As announced at the GPU conference today, Nvidia is releasing new software development kits (SDKs) for VRWorks that will help to enhance VR experiences running on the company’s hardware. One of these is VRWorks Audio, which aims to offer what the company calls ‘physically accurate audio’.
This new kit aims to go beyond VR audio that just takes distance from sounds into account. It also attributes the size, shape and contents of the surrounding environment when generating audio. In other words, it takes acoustics into account using Nvidia’s OptiX ray-tracing tech, assessing environments in real time and realistically adapting sound to that information. Imagine the different in standing in a small room and shouting, then doing the same in a large open environment; it’s those kinds of differences that the Audio SDK aims to capture. The SDK has already been integrated with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4.
Next up is real time stitching for the VRWorks 360 Video SDK, which is being released in public beta today. The SDK allows for 4K 360 video capture to be stitched and streamed in real time, while an upcoming release will allow for the same to happen in stereoscopic 3D. As an example, the platform will soon be able to stitch video shot with the V1 Pro VR from Z Cam, an eight camera rig that captures footage in 4K. That said, your PC will need two Quadro P6000 GPUs to do that.
Nvidia is hosting the keynote speech at this year’s conference on Wednesday, so expect more news to come later in the week.
