Varjo, the Finland-based creator of high-end XR headsets, says its pulling the plug on its cloud XR streaming platform ‘Reality Cloud’, which lets professionals stream and share immersive 3D content rendered on cloud-based GPUs.
It was only a month ago when Varjo announced it was bringing Quest 3 and Quest Pro support to Reality Cloud, in effect making them the first non-Varjo standalone XR devices to use the subscription-based cloud rendering and streaming service.
Now, in a statement obtained by Mixed, Varjo says it’s pulling the plug come June 2024:
While we continue to explore ways to power the highest quality XR streaming, we have made the decision to discontinue development of Reality Cloud as of June 2024. Our customers are the world’s largest enterprises and organizations, and their requirements for XR cloud streaming are more diverse and security-driven than originally anticipated.
A Varjo dedicated commercial cloud streaming service is not what most effectively serves them, and we will instead focus on empowering 3rd party streaming solutions and local streaming capabilities for enterprises scaling their VR and XR usage.
Released in 2022, Varjo’s Reality Cloud initially focused on cross-platform collaboration, the ability to manage 3D content at scale, and enterprise-level security. It had a much larger purpose though. Talking to Varjo CEO Timo Toikkanen prior to Reality Cloud’s release, he hoped it would lay the foundation to “release out physical reality from the laws of physics”:
“We believe that Varjo’s vision for the metaverse will elevate humanity during the next decade more than any other technology in the world,” Toikkanen said in a blog post. “What we’re building with our vision for the Varjo Reality Cloud will release our physical reality from the laws of physics. The programmable world that once existed only behind our screens can now merge with our surrounding reality—forever changing the choreography of everyday life.”
Varjo announced it’s now supporting Quest 3 and Quest Pro for its cloud XR streaming platform ‘Reality Cloud’, which lets professionals stream and share immersive 3D content rendered on cloud-based GPUs.
The Finland-based creator of high-end XR headsets is known for its pricey, but high-quality mixed reality headsets, which are primarily used in the enterprise space for designers and engineers, but also for things such as detailed simulation and training.
You don’t need to plonk down the $3,990 for the company’s base model Varjo XR-4 headset though to use its subscription-based Varjo Reality Cloud service, which offloads intensive XR or VR software rendering to powerful cloud-based GPUs—previously only available to Varjo’s line of enterprise devices.
The update, announced April 5th, brings support to Varjo Reality Cloud to Quest 3 and Quest Pro, making them the fist non-Varjo XR devices to use the subscription-based cloud rendering and streaming service.
Additionally, the company also released an iOS application in February, letting users also access the cloud-rendering platform from a host of iPhone and iPad models.
Granted, it’s no surprise the company has opened its cloud streaming platform to other headsets and mobile devices; the company told us exactly that when we went hands-on with Varjo Reality Cloud back in 2022, noting that the move was targeted at making it easier to scale XR more broadly inside of organizations.
If you’re interested in using Varjo Reality Cloud with Quest devices, check out this guide on how to install it on Quest, which takes you through the process of sideloading the company’s Quest apk file.
Finnish headset manufacturer Varjo launched its immersive collaboration tool Reality Cloud last year. The company has announced an upgrade to the platform today, seeing the addition of cloud streaming for enterprise customers.
Varjo has a vision for metaverse collaboration that’s the same as real life, combining its professional-grade VR/XR hardware with intuitive immersive tools. The cloud streaming rollout on the Varjo Reality Cloud platform will be an early access release for select customers – one of them being electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian – whether they’re in VR with the Varjo Aero or in mixed reality using the flagship Varjo XR-3.
Just like NVIDIA’s CloudXR, the whole point of cloud streaming is the ability to provide high-end workflows on PC’s that weren’t built for intensive VR applications. Varjo has its own foveated transport algorithm that can stream immersive content at a bandwidth of 35 megabits per second. To make this possible Varjo’s collaborative platform is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NVIDIA GPUs.
“Being able to achieve the same quality experience through Varjo Reality Cloud with less powerful local PCs is a game-changer for companies looking to scale their use of virtual and mixed reality,” said Urho Konttori, founder and CTO of Varjo in a statement. “Now, with our new cloud streaming service, users can join photorealistic virtual experiences with almost any laptop with a dedicated NVIDIA GPU and a Varjo headset and start collaborating in an immersive environment.”
Varjo Reality Cloud is still under development itself with an official commercial launch expected to take place during the first half of 2022.
Alongside Varjo Reality Cloud, the company is making it (a bit) easier to access its products thanks to the release of Varjo Aero several months back. The cheapest headset the company has made to date – it’s still $2,000 USD – the Aero packs in some serious specs including 2880 x 2720 px per eye resolution, eye tracking and SteamVR compatibility for those that want the best VR gaming experience.
As Varjo continues to enhance its product lineup gmw3 will keep you updated.
Varjo, makers of high-end XR headsets, today announced it is introducing an XR cloud streaming service for enterprise customers. The streaming solution leverages the headset’s foveated rendering to deliver high quality XR experiences on less powerful machines. The company plans to eventually allow other headsets to make use of the service as well.
Varjo today revealed that it has been developing an XR cloud streaming service for its enterprise customers. The feature comes as an expansion to the recently introduced Varjo Reality Cloud, and the company says its goal is the make it easier for companies to scale the use of XR internally.
Varjo’s high-end headsets offer some of the highest resolution and sharpest visuals available in any headset on the market today. Rendering virtual content for those headsets understandably requires some pretty hefty hardware… a low-powered laptop simply won’t cut it. The need for computers with beefy GPUs to power the company’s headsets has constrained the ability of customers to scale the use of Varjo headsets more widely.
Varjo sees cloud rendering as a solution to this issue and has set out to build its own XR cloud streaming service. The idea is that the rendering is done on powerful servers in the cloud and then streamed to the headset. This approach can significantly reduce the power required of the local computer that the headset is plugged into.
Of course, Varjo is far from the first company to have experimented with this. And their situation is particularly challenging because of the high resolution of their headsets compared to many others on the market.
And yet the company seems to be rising to the challenge with what it says is its own solution built atop AWS’s low latency ‘Wavelength’ platform. I got an exclusive early preview of the feature running on the Varjo XR-3 headset.
When I first put the headset on I saw a high fidelity virtual car rendered against the real backdrop of the room as seen through the headset’s cameras—a demo I’ve seen in some form or another plenty of times in Varjo’s headsets. But this time the headset was plugged into a fairly thin laptop instead of a desktop-class rig. The car in front of me, explained Varjo’s Chief Technology Officer, Urho Konttori, was being rendered entirely in the cloud on an AWS server in Oregon… a few hundred miles North from where I was standing in Silicon Valley.
The scene in front of me appeared entirely sharp on the headset’s ‘retina resolution’ display, and aside from the occasional hiccup that showed a bit of artifacting around the edges of the car, it ran just as smoothly as I’d expect from a locally rendered XR experience.
Impressively, this wasn’t a highly controlled demo on some kind of dedicated, staged connection. According to Konttori, the laptop running the stream was plugged into the general internet connection that happened to be available at the space the company had reserved for its demo. The upstream and downstream connection was running over the regular old internet to the server in Oregon and back, which Konttori said demonstrates the system is robust enough for real-world deployments.
That’s partly thanks to the company’s “foveated transport algorithm,” which it says makes use of the headset’s eye-tracking to help compress the downstream bandwidth requirement to just 35 megabits per second.
Konttori told me that Varjo is going the extra mile by focusing on the feature’s usability. Once a company has configured their software to run in the cloud, users can start a cloud session with a single click right from the Varjo software. Further, the company says it plans to support link-based invitations to cloud sessions, so that anyone with a headset and the Varjo software installed can instantly view the right content without installing any additional software.
Varjo’s XR-3 headset | Image courtesy Varjo
Varjo sees this ease-of-use as being particularly important for making it easier for customers to scale the use of XR headsets internally. While an auto manufacturer’s design team, for instance, might work with headsets regularly and have the high-powered machines to run them, other stakeholders are less likely to have an XR capable machine with all the requisite software ready to go. With cloud streamin, those stakeholders could more easily join design review sessions to sign off on the latest changes.
Konttori said that electric car maker Rivian is doing precisely this using an early version of Varjo’s cloud streaming feature integrated with the industry standard Autodesk VRED software.
“With Varjo Reality Cloud, we are able to make high-fidelity immersion a key part of our design development and scale it effectively across locations,” said Trevor Greene, Lead of Visualization Design at Rivian. “This is a turn-key solution that allows users with very different skill levels to be brought into an immersive environment to collaborate—something that hasn’t been possible before.”
But even if stakeholders could jump into an immersive design review with the click of a link… how many of them are likely to have a dedicated XR space—with a headset, tracking beacons, and all? To make XR truly scalable within organizations, you’d really want to support a wide range of headsets from Varjo’s ultra high-end all the way down to standalone devices.
Indeed, Varjo says it plans to do just this. Though the XR cloud streaming feature will only be available on its own headsets at launch, Konttori told me in the future the company plans to open the system up to other headsets, whether they’re PC or Android based. This could of course mean the possibility of using more affordable standalone headsets like Vive Focus 3 or Quest 2 as end-points for high-quality cloud rendered visuals, making it that much easier to scale XR more broadly inside of organizations.
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Varjo’s XR cloud streaming feature is expected to be made widely available to enterprise customers in the first half of the year. It will be sold as an additional feature, on top of the existing annual fee for the company’s enterprise headsets, though the exact pricing model has yet to be revealed.
Finnish hardware company Varjo is known for its high-end, enterprise-only virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) headsets, providing the best image quality to clients. Today, Varjo has revealed it will be expanding its reach beyond mere hardware solutions by announcing Varjo Reality Cloud, a platform designed for universal collaboration and real-time reality sharing.
Currently built around the Varjo XR-3 mixed reality (MR) headset which launched back in December 2020, Varjo Reality Cloud is the company’s own take on a metaverse, where users can come together share ideas and collaborate. Instead of a virtual world, Varjo intends to blend the real with the digital, crucially, in real-time so as if you’re almost teleporting the person you wish to speak to into your room.
Developing and packing the XR-3 with low-latency video pass-through, integrated eye tracking and LiDAR have been important steps toward Varjo Reality Cloud, enabling the headset to accurately scan and digitise a room as well as sharing 3D video feed which only generates single megabytes per second. So the groundwork has been laid over the past five years for Varjo to create an MR metaverse which could be one of the most realistic.
“We believe that Varjo’s vision for the metaverse will elevate humanity during the next decade more than any other technology in the world,” said Timo Toikkanen, CEO of Varjo. “What we’re building with our vision for the Varjo Reality Cloud will release our physical reality from the laws of physics. The programmable world that once existed only behind our screens can now merge with our surrounding reality – forever changing the choreography of everyday life.”
To help in the development of Varjo Reality Cloud the company has announced the acquisition of Norwegian software company Dimension10, which specialises in industrial 3D collaboration for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) teams.
While this all sounds promising Varjo hasn’t released any specific feature details for the new platform, such as possible user numbers in one location or the ability to import assets to work on. This can be seen seen in apps like Spatial which support VR headsets and MR ones like Microsoft HoloLens, allowing users to interact as holograms.
Varjo’s current product lineup features the Varjo VR-3 priced at $3,990 USD (inc. a 1-year Varjo subscription) and the Varjo XR-3 which retails for $6990 (inc the subscription).
While Varjo Reality Cloud Alpha Access will be offered to existing XR-3 customers later this year, the team envisions bringing the platform to multiple headsets and to a wider array of users in the future. It’s still early days for Varjo Reality Cloud so as further details are released, VRFocus will let you know.
Varjo today announced its new Varjo Reality Cloud platform, a device-agnostic VR meeting platform which can scan and share physical spaces in real-time using the depth sensors on its latest XR-3 headsets. The company doesn’t have a specific release date for the tech just yet, but is presenting a glimpse of what it plans to deliver in the future. Road to VR got an early look at the new tech.
Varjo Reality Cloud
Varjo is building a virtual meeting platform not unlike we’ve seen before, but with one key difference: the company plans to leverage the wide field-of-view depth sensors on its Varjo XR-3 headset to allow users to easily capture their surroundings and use it as the basis for virtual meetings. What’s more, beyond just a static capture, the Varjo Reality Cloud platform will continuously update the portion of the environment that’s in the headset’s view while the meeting is happening. That means if there’s something real and relevant in the host’s environment—like a book, product, or even another person—the virtual viewers will be able to see that thing moving and updating in real-time (as long as the host is actively looking at it).
The idea melds well with XR-3’s existing high-quality passthrough capabilities. During normal use of the headset it’s easy to toggle on the headset’s pass-through view to see the environment around you, which means if you were sharing your local environment through the Varjo Reality Cloud, it could seem like others in the meeting were standing right in the same room as you.
Varjo thus likens its Reality Cloud platform to ‘teleportation’, though I wouldn’t say it goes that far just yet.
Hands-on With the Prototype
I got to see an early prototype of the Varjo Reality Cloud in action during a meeting with the company in Silicon Valley. Using the Varjo XR-3 headset, I was shown a pre-recorded example of a Varjo Reality Cloud meeting space with a person standing in the center of the room talking, gesturing, and showing me some objects from around the room. While most of the room around me was static, the person was essentially being ‘filmed’ by an XR-3 headset, which meant their movements (and anything in a certain area around them) were being updated in real-time.
To be clear, the environment I was seeing wasn’t just flat or even 180 footage, it was an actual volumetric space, and so was the person that was standing inside the room. And while I could definitely make out the specific person I was looking at and the room around me, in this prototype phase the fidelity leaves a lot to be desired. The room scan and the person in front of me were assembled from a splotchy point-cloud of colored dots—far from the incredible quality of several of Varjo’s photogrammetry demos that I’ve seen in the past.
While it’s almost certain that the Varjo Reality Cloud won’t look as good as careful pre-captured photogrammetry any time soon, the company says that what I was looking at is merely a proof of concept, and that improvements in fidelity are expected as they move forward with development.
One important part of that ongoing development will be moving the whole thing into the cloud. While the demo I saw was a pre-recorded example of the Varjo Reality Cloud, ultimately the company plans to stream the captured environments from the cloud to any participants in the room, leaving the bulk of the computing to be done in the cloud. To do so at the highest possible quality on its ultra-high resolution headsets, the company says it has developed a foveated compression algorithm to cut the stream down to just “single megabytes per second.” My understanding is that that algorithm specifically takes advantage of the eye-tracking that’s built into Varjo headsets.
Device Agnostic
But Varjo headsets aren’t the only devices that will be able to join the Varjo Reality Cloud. While it’ll take an XR-3—with its equipped depth-sensors—to capture and stream the environments, the company says that it’s taking a device-agnostic approach to participants. The company expects that participants joining Varjo Reality Cloud sessions could be on computers, smartphones, tablets, and other VR headsets too.
