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.”
Some major car manufacturers still design cars in clay before heading into production, and while that tradition doesn’t seem to be going away just yet, companies like Ford, Volvo and Rivian say mixed reality headsets are substantially helping them to reduce time and cost in vehicle design.
In a new video focusing on the Australia-base ddesign team behind the Ford Ranger, Ranger Raptor and Everest, we get a look at just how one of the world’s largest car manufacturers is using mixed reality, namely Varjo’s enterprise-focused XR-3 headset.
“We’ve been using mixed reality in the design process for more than a year now and it’s incredibly exciting,” reveals Andrew Dallan-Jones, Visualization Manager at Ford Design. Catch the team’s full explanation in the video below:
Ford’s visual design team says mixed reality also improves collaboration, letting colleagues hash things out earlier in the design process before committing to a physical prototype, which the designers say helps “speed up the design process and reduce changes.” It also allows the team to conduct “high-resolution, face-to-face virtual design reviews with colleagues,” which are distributed across Melbourne, the US and Europe.
Another company using Varjo’s XR tech is the US electric car company Rivian, which says the total cost savings just from the reduced need for materials and physical mockups has been “a million dollars per vehicle program.”
“At Rivian, design time is of the essence. Together with [Autodesk] VRED, Varjo has taken a lot of time and money out of the process and lets us iterate and integrate more quickly than ever before,” says Trevor Greene, Lead Visualization Design at Rivian Automotive.
Image courtesy Rivian
Rivian says in a Varjo blog post that mixed reality has also helped speed up the design iteration cycle, letting the team create “2-3 times the amount of iterations in the same amount of time they were before.”
“This helps the team build better cars and quickly get answers to practical questions such as does a door panel feel high, or are the driver’s seat and steering wheel placed at a good height,” Rivian says.
One of the longest supporters of mixed reality collaboration has been Volvo, which has been using Varjo headsets since the introduction of Varjo XR-1 in 2019.
Back in 2019, Volvo CTO Henrik Green said it was hoping to gain “considerable potential cost savings by identifying priorities and clearing bottlenecks much earlier in the design and development process.”
Now, Volvo says it also uses Varjo’s ‘Reality’ cloud streaming ability to share design mock-ups across the US, China, and the company’s Sweden-based head office.
And why Varjo? It seems to be a natural fit for car manufacturers to go with the Finland-based XR headset company, which is not only touted for creating some of the highest-resolution headsets, but by being one of the first enterprise-focused companies out there to offer full-color mixed reality passthrough in their headsets.
Needing to buy that high-end, enterprise hardware direct from Varjo isn’t exactly a must nowadays though, at least as far as mixed reality collaboration goes. Varjo announced in April it was offering support for Quest 3 and Quest Pro on Reality Cloud, which could potentially expand the reach who can view and experience a digital vehicle mock-up.
Still, we don’t expect to see Varjo pull back from creating industry-leading hardware, as its high-end headsets like its latest Varjo XR-4 are still far and away in their own category, not only offering significant spec bumps over convention XR headsets, but even a model that guarantees government-grade compliancy for the most sensitive of projects.
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.
Varjo, the Finland-based creator of high-end XR headsets, announced their businesses and prosumer-focused SteamVR headset Aero is now permanently 50% off its original $2,000 price tag.
Aero is essentially a pared down version of the company’s strictly enterprise headsets, offering industry-leading fidelity and advanced features such as eye-tracking.
Released in October 2021, Aero was (and still is) the company’s least expensive headset; it’s now priced at $990 (€990), bringing the Helsinki, Finland-based company into a new price segment which its hoping will appeal to at-home simulator fans.
Photo by Road to VR
Ther news was revealed at during the company’s hour-long ‘Aeroversity’ livestream celebrating the device’s two years since launch. Besides the price drop reveal, Varjo focused heavily on the headset’s use in both driving and flight sims.
When we reviewed Varjo Aero in late 2021, we called it the “dream headset for VR simmers who aren’t afraid to trade cash for immersion,” as it offered some pretty stunning clarity (35 PPD) that’s beaten only by the company’s more expensive headsets.
Notably, the $990 package doesn’t include SteamVR base stations and motion controllers, making it appeal mostly to users already in the SteamVR tracking ecosystem. What’s in the box: Varjo Aero headset, VR adapter, power supply unit with 6 x power plugs (EURO, UK, US, AUS, KOR, CHN), in-ear headphones with microphone, user guide, cleaning cloth.
The price drop looks to be, in part, a response to the growing number of new PC VR headsets offering higher resolution micro displays, notably with the Bigscreen Beyond leading the charge at $1,000 for just the headset, which includes 2,560 × 2,560 (6.5MP) per-eye resolution microOLEDs clocked at 75/90Hz.
Varjo, maker of high-end XR headsets, today announced that it has closed a multi-million dollar deal to supply headsets for the U.S. Army’s Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Air Trainer (RVCT-A) initiative.
The US. Army’s Reconfigurable Virtual Collective Air Trainer (RVCT-A) aims to deliver virtual training modules that are easy to set up and transport, making training cheaper and more accessible. Specifically the training modules are focused on training pilots of Apache, Chinook, and Blackhawk helicopters.
Varjo says it has been selected by integrator Cole Engineering to supply XR-3 Focal Edition headsets for the program in what amounts to a “multi-million dollar” deal for the company.
Varjo isn’t saying exactly how many headsets it will furnish for the program, but a rough estimate (using a minimum floor of $2 million for the deal and the $6,500 price of Varjo XR-3) suggests somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 headsets. Varjo’s deal may include ongoing revenue from the annual Varjo Subscription service that’s required to use its professional headsets.
Varjo cites the headset’s ability to do high-quality passthrough and occlusion which enables the RVCT-A modules to support a mix of real and virtual imagery. This is especially important given the need to train pilots with their hands on the actual controls of the aircraft, rather than expecting them to fiddle with VR controllers. And of course the headset includes the company’s signature ‘bionic display’, which offers retina resolution in a small area at the center of the headset’s field-of-view.
VR flight simulation and training has been around for decades in militaries across the world. In many cases, flight training has involved full-sized cockpit replicas and dome-projection displays that are large and difficult to transport. Today it’s possible to provide an immersive field-of-view inside a VR headset, making portable flight trainers much more practical.
Image courtesy Varjo
Varjo’s headset deal is just one part of Cole Engineering’s $500 million contract to supply RVCT modules to the U.S. Army, including a Ground version for infantry training.
That broader contract is part of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment (STE) initiative which seeks to enhance the branch’s training programs with immersive capabilities.
“[Cole Engineering’s] RVCT solution is built upon a modular hardware architecture, which allows RVCT to replicate U.S. Army ground and air vehicles through common configuration items. The combination of high-fidelity physical and virtual control interfaces utilizes real-world system hardware and immerses the Soldier via Virtual and Augmented Reality through the Synthetic Training Environment-Information System (STE-IS) software,” Cole Engineering wrote about its contract with the Army.
Varjo says its deal with Cole Engineering to supply headsets for the RVCT program is “one of the 70+ immersive defense training programs featuring Varjo’s hardware and software solutions worldwide.”
Varjo today announced the launch of Varjo Reality Cloud, the company’s XR cloud streaming platform that’s aimed at making XR more scalable in enterprise settings by doing the heavy lifting of rendering in the cloud. At the outset the company is targeting the automotive industry, but plans to enable enterprises more broadly with support for Unity & Unreal Engine.
Enterprise & enthusiast headset maker Varjo announced its XR streaming platform earlier this year; now the company says the service is officially launched. At the outset, the service supports Autodesk VRED, an industry standard application for automotive design and visualization.
One-click Cloud Sessions
With Varjo Reality Cloud, the company says auto makers will be able to spin up a session of VRED in the cloud and then send a simple link to colleagues who will be able to join the session with just a click. Using a Varjo headset, the user will be able to get an immersive and collaborative look at a vehicle’s design.
The goal, the company says, is to make it easier for stakeholders to be part of the design review earlier in the process—expanding the use of XR beyond just the engineers and designers and into the realm of marketers, executives, and the like.
Varjo Reality Cloud achieves this by drastically lowering the hardware specs needed to render the VR session (since all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud) and eliminating the need for any local software installation or large file downloads (beyond the basic software needed to connect a Varjo headset). You’ll still need a medium-spec laptop, but that’s more portable and less expensive than professional workstations that you’d find in the design department of many enterprises.
Image courtesy Varjo
Varjo says the cloud rendering delivers the same retina resolution quality that users would see through their headsets when rendered locally. This is achieved, the company claims, with a foveated compression algorithm that compresses the data at a 1,000:1 ratio. That is to say that the company is making use of the eye-tracking tech in its headsets to more smartly decide where to trade quality for compression to reduce the bandwidth required.
Indeed, the recommended bandwidth for Varjo Reality Cloud is quite reasonable at 35 Mbps. And rom my exclusive preview of an early version of the service, the rendering quality is no joke. What I saw easily stood up to the company’s high bar for image quality in their headsets and in a blind test it would be difficult to tell if it was being rendered locally or not based on image quality alone.
Unity & Unreal On the Way
Varjo is starting with out-of-the-box support for Autodesk VRED because the company says it has identified a clear need among those using its headsets in the automotive industry.
But Varjo says it plans to widen the appeal of its Reality Cloud service to enterprises more broadly; later this year the company plans to add support for Unreal Engine and Unity so arbitrary XR projects can be delivered from its cloud platform. To demonstrate the capability the company showed a demo of Epic’s MetaHuman streamed from the cloud.
To Varjo and Beyond
Building an XR cloud streaming service is a huge undertaking to increase the scalability of XR headsets in enterprise settings, but the company seems dead set on tackling ease-of-use to make that happen. To that end, while Varjo Reality Cloud is only available on the company’s own headsets today, it isn’t drawing the line there. Varjo says it plans to open the platform up to other XR headsets in the future, as well as non-XR devices like PCs and smartphones.
While lowering the hardware requirements from a beefy desktop to a slim laptop is nice… the reality is that Varjo’s headsets need base stations for tracking, which is still a pretty high barrier. In the future, the company says Varjo Reality Cloud may also support standalone headsets which would be an even larger step up in ease-of-use.
As for the company’s more ambitious plans for Varjo Reality Cloud… it seems those are further off still. For the time being—if you happen to be looking to stream VRED from the cloud for automotive design reviews—Varjo is charging $1,495 per month for the service, which includes up to five concurrent users.
Every weekend gmw3 gathers together vacancies from across the virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) industries, in locations around the globe to help make finding that ideal job easier. Below is a selection of roles that are currently accepting applications across a number of disciplines, all within departments and companies that focus on immersive entertainment.
Don’t forget, if there wasn’t anything that took your fancy this week there’s always last week’s listings on The VR Job Hubto check as well.
If you are an employer looking for someone to fill an immersive technology related role – regardless of the industry – don’t forget you can send us the lowdown on the position and we’ll be sure to feature it in that following week’s feature. Details should be sent to Peter Graham (pgraham@vrfocus.com).
We’ll see you next week on gmw3 at the usual time of 3PM (UK) for another selection of jobs from around the world.
Varjo’s Aero headset is the first from the company that’s meant to appeal to individual customers rather than large organizations… and it probably won’t be the last.
Since the company’s inception, Varjo has sold high-end enterprise headsets to the likes of Fortune 500 companies. That is until just last month when the company started shipping its new Aero headset which was not only substantially cheaper but was, for the first time, sold without any kind of annual upkeep fee which made the company’s other headsets a non-starter for individual buyers.
Varjo Aero | Image courtesy Varjo
And while it’s possible the company had formulated Aero as a sort of one-off experiment, it seems Varjo has been satisfied enough with the reception that it intends for Aero to become an ongoing series of headsets for the high-end enthusiast segment.
Speaking to Road to VR this week, Varjo Chief Technical Officer Urho Konttori touched on Aero’s recent launch, saying that the headset is still backordered but he expects things to start catching up in February. As of now the company’s website advises “3–4 months” from purchase to delivery.
As for what happens in the future, Konttori said that Aero would “probably” become an ongoing series of headsets from the company, rather than a one-off. Although the company still seems primarily dead set on serving the high-end enterprise space, the move means the company also expects to target high-end enthusiasts with more headsets in the future.
That could dovetail in an interesting way with some of the software the company has been building internally, especially its XR cloud streaming tech; though initially targeted toward enterprise customers, the company confirmed that the tech supports any OpenVR/SteamVR applications without modification, and plans to expand the feature to other headsets in the future. While the company says that multi-headset support is primarily aimed at making XR more scalable within large organizations, it’s not so far fetched to think that the company could offer it to individuals at some point in the future.
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.
