Nvidia Kicks Off GTC With Release Of VRWorks Audio, 360 Video SDKs
Nvidia didn't waste any time heading into the annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC). Today is the first day of the four-day conference, and the company has already released the VRWorks Audio SDK it teased at GTC 2016 as well as the VRWorks 360 Video SDK for real-time 360-degree 4K video stitching.
VRWorks Audio builds on the company's past work with ray tracing technology. The VRWorks Audio SDK uses the ray tracing capabilities of Nvidia’s GPUs to accurately simulate how sound reflects, refracts, and diffracts by passing through or bouncing off different surfaces. It also considers the size, shape, and material properties of the objects in the environment. This means that as you move or look around a scene, the GPU recalculates how the waves would be affected before reaching your ears and makes sure that's what you hear through your headset.
Nvidia is showing off a demo of the VRWorks Audio technology in action to attendees of GTC 2017. If you aren’t at the conference, you can get a glimpse of VRWorks Audio’s potential through a short YouTube clip that demonstrates the technology in action.
Not Just Developers
Nvidia released a second SDK alongside the VRWorks Audio SDK, which is meant for content creators more than it is for developers. This VRWorks 360 Video SDK introduces real-time GPU-powered video stitching for professional content creators. This should allow professional video content creators to leverage the extreme compute power of Nvidia’s Quadro GPU lineup to stitch 4K 360-degree video clips together in stereo in real-time.
The VRWorks 360 Video SDK can pull video feeds from up to 32 cameras and stitch them together into a 360-degree spherical video file that can be saved for later or shown in a live-stream video feed.
"The fact that NVIDIA manages to stitch 4K 360 stereoscopic videos in real time, making livestreaming possible, changes the production pipeline and enables entirely new use cases in VR,” said Kinson Loo, CEO of Z CAM.
Nvidia is demonstrating the VRWorks 360 Video stitching technology at GTC using a Z CAM V1 PRO VR camera, which comes equipped with eight 4K cameras. The company put two of its Quadro P6000 GPUs to work to capture and stitch the high-resolution stereo video feed in real-time on the show floor.
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Available Now
If you want to use the VRWorks Audio technology in your VR experiences, you can find the VR Works Audio SDK on the Nvidia Gameworks downloads page. The VRWorks 360 Video SDK is also available today, and you can find it on the Gameworks Download page next to the VRWorks Audio SDK. You can also check out the VRWorks web page for more information about the VRWorks Audio SDK, VRWorks 360 Video SDK, and other VRWorks technologies.
Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.