Category: AMD

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AMD Showcasing Two New Cinematic VR experiences at the Mumbai Film Festival

AMD has been a long term supporter of virtual reality (VR), whether that’s been through products such as its VR-Ready graphics cards, or various collaborations to promote and develop the technology. Today the company will be at the Mumbai Film Festival in India, with AMD’s Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect of the AMD Radeon Technologies Group, showcasing new technologies to create immersive cinematic content, and two new cutting-edge VR experiences.

For the festival Koduri will take to the stage alongside SS Rajamouli, the director of Baahubali: The Conclusion, to unveil AMD’s technology to rapidly capture and create cinematic quality 360-degree video. Part of this includes a prototype of an AMD-developed VR capture camera (codenamed ‘BB360’) and video stitching software, Project Loom. Loom allowed the production team to rapidly stitch 360-degree video in real-time compared to many hours or days with previous techniques and technologies. The open source Loom software will be widely available to content creators by the end of the year. These are being used to create promotional VR content for Rajamouli’s upcoming film, Baahubali: The Conclusion, set to premiere in April 2017.

Baahubali The Conclusion

As well as showcasing this new tech, Koduri will be taking part in several other sessions this weekend in which he’ll be revealing two new experiences. The first will be a 360-video on the set of Baahubali: The Conclusion, in which fans will be able to meet the actors, virtually walk around the set, and see the effort that went into making the movie. The video will be available to the public at 11:00am IST on Sunday, 23rd October.

The second experience being shown to attendees is The Sword of Baahubali, offering a glimpse at the ambitious film’s larger than life characters, exotic locations, and powerful drama. This experience will be distributed next year, several weeks before the premiere.

For all the latest VR news from around the world, keep reading VRFocus.

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NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 Ti Is Only $140, Under Evaluation For Rift Minimum Specification

NVIDIA’s GTX 1050 Ti Is Only $140, Under Evaluation For Rift Minimum Specification

If you want a VR-ready console or PC, the core of the system will be driven by a graphics card powered either by AMD or NVIDIA.

AMD found a home inside every PlayStation 4 — some 40 million of them now ready to run PlayStation VR headsets — while NVIDIA seems positioned to lead the home PC market. It’s making for an interesting dynamic as the two graphics chip companies push price down while bringing performance up with new graphics cards. The graphics card is often the most expensive single component in a given VR Ready box, so less expensive chips still capable of driving a high quality experience will be key to lowering barriers for buyers. When combined with software optimizations like those being implemented by Valve and Oculus, the Rift and Vive VR headsets could soon run on a much larger number of machines.

AMD, for its part, is going to power a $500 PC that can drive this minimum experience for the Rift. When combined with the $800 cost for a complete Rift and Touch system, that brings the price of a full VR system down to roughly $1,300, while HTC bundles the Vive with an HP machine for $1,500.

NVIDIA, however, might be able to bring the cost down too. NVIDIA told UploadVR the newly announced GTX 1050 Ti is being evaluated with the newly announced Oculus “Asynchronous Spacewarp” (ASW) optimizations. The GTX 1050 Ti will cost only around $140, so if it is found to meet the Rift minimum specification, it might offer a new entry level for Rift-compatible hardware.

Asynchronous Timewarp (ATW) is an existing optimization Oculus uses to re-project frames in a way that reduces perceived latency between head movement and seeing matching visuals in the headset. The process helps ensure a comfortable VR experience. ASW is a new optimization that complements the earlier one by adjusting for moving objects contained within the scene itself.

Together, the optimizations might allow the GTX 1050 Ti to become the new lowest entry VR hardware. While ASW is under evaluation with the GTX 1050 Ti to see if it will meet the minimum Rift specification, NVIDIA recommends buyers get at least a GTX 1060 or above to drive a Rift.

The GTX 1050 Ti should be available for purchase on Oct. 25.

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AMD Details Radeon Pro Tech During VR on the Lot, Talks of Collaborations For VR Experience Distribution

AMD had a collection of pretty cool announcements that were made during the VR on the Lot event that happened in California the past couple of days, and the main two announcements made was the development of virtual reality (VR) tools, as well as collaborations to bring VR to a wider audience.

What the Radeon Pro tech is aiming to achieve is reaching a point where it can handle professional VR content creation for what AMD recommends to be sold for under $1,000 (USD). The Radeon Pro WX 7100 has a number of software tools that helps with this, such as the Radeon ProRender, an open-source physically-based rendering engine designed to produce photorealistic rendered content.

amd awesome rocketship pods

There is also AMD’s Project Loom designed for 360 degree video stitching that combines up to 24 cameras to bring 4K resolution at 30 FPS in VR. This is helped by the Radeon Pro Solid State Graphics card.

“In creating Radeon Pro, we sought to address the industry’s biggest problems, and for many creators, there’s none bigger than cinematic VR content,” said Roy Taylor, corporate VP and head of alliances, content and VR Radeon Technologies Group at AMD, in a press release. “Bringing your creative vision to life can be a demanding and laborious process and working in VR, those demands are exponentially multiplied. Through extraordinary Radeon Pro hardware and software, we’re helping alleviate the technical burdens of creativity, empowering artists to focus on telling their story, and through our efforts in location-based entertainment, giving them new opportunities to share their work with the world.”

As well as all of this technology being developed, there is also efforts being put into making VR experiences available for everyone with collaborations with Awesome Rocketship, a company who tours VR and will now be coming with a Venue VR Gateway pod (pictured above), Howie’s Game Shack which is the owner of some of the largest games centers in the US which will now feature VR cafes, and VrOOm for cinematic storytelling, a VR car showroom, all companies who are expanding the VR space in various industries.

For more on the latest developments in the industry, as well as all the news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.

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BAFTA Has Announced Its VR Advisory Lead, But the UK Community Isn’t Too Pleased About It

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) have been investing much more time and energy into virtual reality (VR) with a new advisory group dedicated to VR, but it seems as though they might be taking it in a different direction from was is expected of the British VR community. A petition has been made for the BAFTA VR Advisory Group to be entirely based in the UK following the announcement of LA-based Roy Taylor of AMD to lead this UK group.

The aim of this petition is to make BAFTA reconsider making the lead of the VR advisory board either a UK or EU figure. This was started up by Katie Goode of Triangular Pixels, based in Cornwall, in the South of England. She first showed her disappointment when she contested against the announcement of Roy Taylor becoming the lead of the board on Twitter, to which Taylor replied himself that “I promise the EU will have a strong voice. I am English.” Nick Button-Brown, the BAFTA Games Committee Chair, then failed to comment on the matter.

BAFTA

VRFocus got in contact with Goode who shared her disappointment in the lack of response from BAFTA regarding the situation: “There has been no response or discussion even to a full BAFTA member (my developer friend), and no response to me – a BAFTA Crew Member, BAFTA Judge, and someone that’s pushed VR at BAFTA with showing and giving VR talks there.”

When asked who should take on the role of leading the BAFTA VR Advisory Board, Goode replied: “They don’t have to be British, but they do need to be part of the UKVR and EUVR community, be hands on every day, go through what studios over here have to go through.”

She went on to explain why Taylor wasn’t a good choice: “I really don’t know how they came to choosing who they have. I personally have not met Roy, I have not seen him on our online VR community of +800 international developers that talk daily with each other, I haven’t seen any VR work that he’s created himself, hands on. I have no personal qualms with him, but we shouldn’t have a British institution deciding to create a group in the US when we have local experience here in the UK.”

BAFTA are yet to respond to this petition, and VRFocus has reached out for comment to BAFTA and Roy Taylor.

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