GPU Technology Conference 2017 is premier, NVIDIA just announced first set of VR news coming from the conference. Maybe the highlight of today is that the company is releasing VRWorks Audio and 360 Video software development kits. With this move NVIDIA is making VR more immersive, and VR development easier. So lets recap all that came to our knowledge today:
VRWorks is a comprehensive suite of APIs, libraries, and engines that enable application and headset developers to create amazing virtual reality experiences. It enables a new level of presence by bringing physically realistic visuals, sound, touch interactions, and simulated environments to virtual reality. Key components of VRWorks are being adopted by industry leading graphics engines such as Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 to provide developers an easy path to taking advantage of the SDK in their games and applications. VRWorks Audio uses the NVIDIA OptiX ray-tracing engine to simulate the movement, or propagation, of sound within an environment, changing the sound in real time based on the size, shape and material properties of your virtual world — just as you’d experience in real life.
In 2016, NVIDIA announced Audio API as a part of VRworks like this: “Audio can have a huge impact on presence in VR. Traditional VR audio provides an accurate 3D position of the sound source within a virtual environment. However, sound in the real world reflects more than just the location of the source. It’s changed by the physical environment as the waves move through walls and bounce off objects, creating echoes, reverberations or muffled sound. We expect these subtle changes in real life, so their absence in virtual environments subtracts from the realism.”
VRWorks Audio for Physically Accurate Audio
Traditional VR audio provides an accurate 3D position of the audio source within a virtual environment. However, sound in the real world reflects more than just the location of the source; sound is a function of the dimensions and material properties of the physical environment. NVIDIA VRWorks Audio helps create a truly immersive environment by modeling sound propagation phenomena such as reflection, refraction and diffraction. And it does this in real time thanks to the massive processing power of GPUs. Using NVIDIA OptiX ray-tracing technology, VRWorks Audio traces the path of sound in real time, delivering physically accurate audio that reflects the size, shape and material properties of the virtual environment. It’s the only hardware-accelerated and path-traced audio solution that creates a complete acoustic image of the environment in real time without requiring any “pre-baked” knowledge of the scene. As the scene is loaded by the application, the acoustic model is built and updated on the fly; audio effect filters are generated and applied in real time on the sound source waveforms. The software release consists of a set of C-APIs for integration into any engine or application, and an integration for Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 that is available now on GitHub. GTC attendees can visit the VR Village to experience a live demonstration of VRWorks Audio technology, as well as the SDK integrated into Optis’ HIM VR design application. Come hear the difference!
