VRgineers is a startup based in Prague run by CEO founded by Marek Polcak, Martin Holečko, and Václav Bittner. Founded in February of 2017, the startup is on a mission to create the best possible virtual reality experience with only a very specific goal in mind—making a phenomenally high-quality head-mounted display unit (HMU) for enterprise customers.
The end users within enterprise are designers, engineers and architects interested in moving beyond 2D display screens to a high-quality virtual reality ecosystem—one that supports3D software of their choice. These are the people who are looking to VR to improve their work both managerially and operationally, internally and externally, for collaborative visualization experiences like design reviews, simulations and training modules.
Numerous announcements released by VRgineers last month included a few key partnerships, forecasting continual and future features to integrate into current and impending versions of the VRHero 5K Plus.
One announcement described a new partnership with Leap Motion—integrating their hand-tracking technology into VRgineers headsets. Another announced a partnership with Ultrahaptics to integrate their ultrasound-based haptic technology into the Hero 5K Plus.
But the most recent announced a partnership with NVIDIA to incorporate the new NVIDIA Quadro GV100 deep learning GPU, which was revealed for the first time to the public during a presentation at NVIDIA’s GDC 2018 conference, held last week in San Francisco.
VRgineers teamed up with NVIDIA to integrate the Quadro GV100 into its high-end virtual reality ecosystem to improve and extend its capabilities. The high-powered GPU will help the Hero 5K Plus run more complicated and intricate 3D scenes of a larger scale automatically, removing the tedious task of manually optimizing the HMU for demanding tasks like particle simulations or antialiasing.
By automating manual calibration of the Hero 5k Plus for complicated operational and managerial content, VRgineers and NVIDIA hope that streamlining industrial applications will improve the adoption rate for incorporating virtual reality in enterprise-level companies and organizations. They are especially looking to convert those potential enterprise customers who may be on the fence, and one reason they may be on the fence is due to the perceived limitations found in the quality and capability of today’s popular headsets (Oculus Rift and HTC Vive).
The VRHero platform is used by enterprise customers like BMW, Volkswagen and Audi. VRgineers seems to be focused on selling to the same cross-section of enterprise customers as those who may have purchased Computer Aided Virtual Environment (CAVE) systems in the past.
CAVE systems were the dominant and popular virtual reality tools for enterprise in few sectors beyond automotive and aerospace prior to the acceleration of market interest in headsets, which occurred with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive in 2015. Since then, there has been less interest in CAVE systems, and more in virtual reality headsets.
How Are Automotive Companies Using VRHero Platform?
BMW, Audi, and Volkswagen Are using the VRHero platform primarily as a visualization tool to improve operational efficiency in areas such as design validation and evaluation. The goal is simple: by leveraging the immersive virtual reality workflow, designers can reduce the time it takes to develop new car models and save the company money.
Integrating Quadro GV100 Deep Learning GPUs into Virtual Reality Headsets
By integrating their Hero 5K Plus system with NVIDIA’s Quadro GV100 GPU, VRgineers can pursue their mission-critical objective of making a super high-end virtual reality headset that stands out from other options in an increasingly crowded enterprise space.
Perhaps the feature that stands out most is the Quad HD OLED displays, which have better display specs than the new iPhone X. And with 24-bit RGB colors, the level of photorealism will be high, but like all things in the virtual reality space—you must try it for yourself to inform your opinion. Any company can make itself look good on the internet, but the proof is in the virtual experience.
Since VRgineers is a startup, their race to design, manufacture and bring to market the best virtual reality ecosystem and experience out there to lean towards “bleeding edge” technology like NVIDIA’s Quadro GX100. Part of the thrill of watching startups who keep tight control over the software and hardware in unestablished markets like virtual reality, is too see whether they can pull off remarkable feats of engineering, primarily by knowing when to fine-tune and incorporate new tech into their products and when to table it or discard it altogether.
The Next Version of VRgineers Ecosystem
March has been a busy month of announcements for the fledgling startup, and VRgineers has a lot of work to do to follow through with its announcement of a next generation VR headset—which will bear the fruits of the company’s many recent partnerships.
With Ultrahaptics, the user can expect to be able to “feel” digital objects you “hold” in virtual reality environments through calibrated ultrasound receptors in electronic hand-gear (like gloves). With Leap Motion, the user can expect a high degree of control when manipulating digital objects, and they can also expect precise and accurate tracking vis-a-vi hyper-minimal latency between the physical movements that produce any give digital action in real-time. This next version of the VR Hero 5k Plus ecosystem will be available sometime later this year, according to the company.
Bottom Line
In general, one could assume that the initial wave of excitement for a possible hit product for virtual reality in the consumer arena has been supplemented by a renewed fervor for making the best and most advanced virtual reality ecosystem for enterprise customers.
Adopting virtual reality in industrial sectors means that developers will have to be able to create custom applications that have flexibility built into them. Any such application will have to save more money than it costs to implement the system and train workers.
In the automotive and aerospace sectors, technology that provides enough power to simulate complex 3D environments—whether a massive assembly for an engine, chassis or a massive structure for AEC professionals—first must prove itself worthy of investment through additional enterprise use cases with proven cost-benefit analyses that show a significant level of improved efficiency to justify adoption.
One area of clear cost-reduction is in prototyping. The more accurately a digital prototype can be itself—as well as be used for simulation in digital environments that accurately mirror the eventual product’s real environment—the more cost effective it will be.
For old CAVE-dwellers like automotive and aerospace who occupy the enterprise space and rely heavily on architects, engineers and designers to create new products, structures or operational procedures in manufacturing, the writing is on the wall: HTC Vive and Oculus Rift are developing too slow and moving in the opposite direction of higher quality at a higher cost. Nobody would buy more Vives and Rifts if the cost kept going up.
While HTC Vive and Oculus Rift are yielding to demands to make them more palatable to the gaming masses, companies like VRgineers and a few others are filling the void for moving in the direction of higher-quality at higher expense—but they must be phenomenally capable and flexible enough to develop custom applications on, and powerful enough to run vast amounts of 3D data seamlessly.