Omniverse XR 2022.1 ships

Nvidia has released Omniverse XR 2022.1, the first public beta of its Omniverse extended reality app.

The add-on enables users of Omniverse, Nvidia’s real-time 3D collaboration platform, to view production-scale USD assets in virtual or augmented reality with real-time ray tracing.

(Full disclosure: the beta was actually released last month, but we didn’t manage to post a story at the time.)

View production-quality USD assets in virtual reality without pre-processing
Omniverse XR lets Omniverse users review scenes in virtual reality using a SteamVR-compatible headset, or to stream them to an iOS or Android tablet for viewing in augmented reality via Nvidia’s CloudXR SDK.

It’s designed to visualise production-complexity USD assets in real time, without pre-processing: this demo shows a scene containing 70 million modelled polygons, and a total of 18 billion polygons after instancing.

Rendering is ray traced, being powered by Omniverse’s RTX renderer, and in consequence supports features like soft shadows and translucency out of the box.

Foveated rendering is used to focus computational effort at the user’s point of focus within the VR view.

Even so, Omniverse XR requires a pretty powerful GPU: Nvidia recommends a top-of-the-range RTX A6000 workstation card, or at least a GeForce RTX 3070 gaming card.

Viewers can navigate or teleport around the scene, and there are “basic” tools for manipulating objects, but it’s currently more of a tool for reviewing existing scenes than laying them out in VR.

Pricing and system requirements
Omniverse XR 2022.1 is available in beta for Windows 10+. RTX rendering requires a Nvidia GPU. It has been tested with HTC’s Vive Pro and Meta’s Quest 2, but any SteamVR HMD should work for viewing scenes.

Omniverse itself is available for Windows 10 and CentOS 7/Ubuntu 18.04 Linux. It is free for individual artists. You can find details of Omniverse Enterprise pricing for studios in this story.

Omniverse XR 2022.1 ships

Related Posts