Virtual Desktop has collaborated with Qualcomm to integrate the company’s Snapdragon Game Super Resolution, a software enhancement squarely targeted at increasing the wireless streaming quality and latency of PC visuals to Quest 2.
Virtual Desktop is a great tool not only because it provides Quest users wireless access to their computers, but because its developer, Guy Godin, is constantly adding in new features to tempt users away from using built-in solutions, i.e. Air Link.
That’s a tall order since Air Link is free and actually pretty great, letting Quest users connect to their VR-ready PCs to play games like Half-Life: Alyx, but Virtual Desktop goes a few steps further. With its PC native application developed for high quality wireless Quest streaming, you can do things like cycle through multiple physical monitors and even connect to up to four separate computers—a feature set you probably won’t see on the Air Link change log.
Now Godin has worked with Qualcomm to integrate the company’s Snapdragon Game Super Resolution for built-in upscaling, essentially creating higher resolution images from lower resolution inputs so it can be served up to Quest in higher fidelity. Check out the results below:
Because producing clearer visuals with fewer resources is the name of the game, Qualcomm says in a blog post that its techniques can also reduce wireless bandwidth, system pressure, memory, and provide power requirements.
Godin says in a Reddit post that the new upscaling works with “Potato, Low, Medium quality (up to 120fps) and High (up to 90fps), and it upscales to Ultra resolution under the hood. It can work with SSW enabled as well and doesn’t introduce any additional latency.”
You can get Virtual Desktop on Quest over at the Quest Store, priced at $20. It’s also available on Pico Neo 3 and Pico 4, which you can find in-headset over on the Pico Store.
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.
Stadia, Google’s cloud-gaming company, is looking for new hires with a preference for virtual reality development experience.
Stadia is Google’s cloud-gaming service which runs games on powerful computers in the cloud and then streams them to your PC, laptop, or even smartphone. The idea is to allow any device to feel like a high-end gaming PC.
Stadia doesn’t currently offer VR cloud-gaming, but it seems to be a natural fit for the use-case considering that high-end VR gaming is exclusively in the realm of beefy gaming PCs, which create a high barrier to entry. If you could keep the high-powered processing in the cloud and then stream the results down to a headset connected to a low-powered computer (or even a standalone headset), you could make PC VR much more accessible. Indeed, new Stadia job listings from Google suggest the company is exploring the possibility.
Four job listings posted or updated as recently as September 7th seek developers and engineers with virtual reality experience among the “preferred qualifications” of the roles.
Interestingly, the roles are spread across Stadia teams that cover the spectrum from developer features to end-user features like game discovery.
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Google isn’t the only company with VR cloud-gaming ambitions. Nvidia has already created its own VR cloud-streaming infrastructure called CloudXR, though it’s designed as a foundation for others to build upon rather than being a user-facing service itself. Still we may see the company use CloudXR to bring VR cloud-gaming capabilities to its existing consumer-facing cloud-gaming service, GeForce Now.
Similarly, Facebook kicked off its own cloud-gaming service last year. While it doesn’t offer VR gaming yet, the project is led by a former Oculus executive who clearly understands the potential of VR cloud-gaming.
VR cloud-streaming is definitely viable, but the key bottleneck is less about software or bandwidth and much more about latency. As we explored in our article about the ramifications of 5G on VR and AR, the real holdup for such services becoming widely available is the proliferation of edge computing infrastructure.
With SIGGRAPH going on this week computing specialist NVIDIA has released several new updates regarding its virtual reality (VR) compatible tech. The latest focuses on the NVIDIA CloudXR platform, revealing that it’s now collaborating with Google Cloud to provide high-quality XR streaming.
The announcement sees NVIDIA CloudXR brought to NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation instances on Google Cloud, enabling organisations and XR users to securely access data their data and work with others all inside virtual, augmented or mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) experiences.
To showcase the tech NVIDIA has teamed up with Masterpiece Studio and its 3D creation platform Masterpiece Studio Pro which works with a variety of PC-based VR headsets like HTC Vive and Valve Index. Leveraging CloudXR and Google Cloud, artists are able to stream and collaborate on character creation.
“Creators should have the freedom of working from anywhere, without needing to be physically tethered to a workstation to work on characters or 3D models in VR,” said Jonathan Gagne, CEO at Masterpiece Studio in a statement. “With NVIDIA CloudXR, our customers will be able to power their creative workflows in high-quality immersive environments, from any location, on any device.”
Masterpiece Studio Pro
“NVIDIA CloudXR technology delivered via Google Cloud’s global private fiber optic network provides an optimized, high-quality user experience for remotely streamed VR experiences. This unique combination unlocks the ability to easily stream work from anywhere using NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation,” said Rob Martin, Chief Architect for Gaming at Google. “With NVIDIA CloudXR on Google Cloud, the future of VR workflows can be more collaborative, intuitive, and productive.”
That all sounds great but it isn’t available just yet. NVIDIA CloudXR is currently in Early Access for developers to sign up to with the Google Cloud feature rolling out later this year. For those interested, a private beta will be available soon. VRFocus will continue its coverage of NVIDIA, reporting back with further updates.
NVIDIA is continuing the rollout of its CloudXR technology on the three leading cloud computing platforms: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. With the tech readily available from these providers, companies building products and services on these cloud providers will be able to offer real-time XR streaming right off the shelf.
Today during the company’s GTC 2021 developer conference, Nvidia announced that its CloudXR tech is now available on Amazon Web Services, and it’s coming soon to both Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Google Cloud. That means the service will be available across the three leading cloud computing platforms, massively expanding access to cloud rendered AR and VR capabilities for companies building cloud applications. Nvidia also says it’s working to bring CloudXR to Tencent Cloud.
The hope of XR streaming is to remove the high-end hardware barrier by rendering immersive visuals in the cloud and streaming them to a host device which itself doesn’t need particularly beefy or expensive hardware; the host device could be a PC, smartphone, or standalone headset.
Nvidia has long offered a very similar streaming service called GeForce Now, but it’s for traditional games rather than XR. CloudXR is a specialized solution for the unique latency and performance requirements of VR and AR streaming.
Image courtesy NVIDIA
Nvidia says the CloudXR system can stream any SteamVR content to end users on Windows or Android systems without any special modification to the streamed application. That could be game and entertainment content or enterprise and productivity content like high-end 3D visualization or immersive design applications; whatever the operator wants to offer to its employees or customers.
Nvidia offers CloudXR client applications for PC, HoloLens 2, Android VR devices (including Oculus Quest), and Android AR devices. Today Nvidia also said it will soon launch CloudXR 2.1 which will support iOS, allowing iPhones and iPads to stream high-quality AR content from the cloud.
In addition to rolling out CloudXR on major cloud computing platforms, Nvidia also offers an SDK for the service which allows companies to run the capabilities on their own servers if desired.
While the idea of streaming AR and VR content from the cloud has been around for many years now, Nvidia’s CloudXR is by far the most mature and scalable solution available to date, and furthers its lead with today’s news of its off-the-shelf availability heading to the largest cloud computing providers.
Guy Godin’s Virtual Desktophas been around since 2016, originally allowing PC users to use their computers in VR. In 2019 the app came to Oculus Quest allowing wireless PC streaming but the feature was subsequently removed. Now it’s back, officially through the Oculus Quest store with no sideloading required.
That 2019 launch happened in May, it was in June that Facebook caused an uproar by requesting the feature be removed. With the community up in arms, the developer offered a workaround via a patch that needed to be sideloaded from SideQuest. Thus making the process more complicated than it needed to be.
He then submitted the app to Oculus’ new App Lab once that launched which would’ve made the process easier. Thankfully, even App Lab wasn’t needed as Godin announced the rollout today of Virtual Desktop 1.20, finally adding PC streaming as an official feature. So that means you can wirelessly stream your favourite PC VR titles like Half-Life: Alyx or Phasmophobia for example.
As for the other update additions in Virtual Desktop v1.20:
Added multi-account support in the Streamer app (Windows only for now)
Screenshots taken on your Quest while using Virtual Desktop are now automatically transferred to your desktop (Windows only for now)
Added voice-over for notifications
Added Wi-Fi speed information, runtime used by game and GPU name to the Performance Overlay
Changed Sliced Encoding and Microphone Passthrough to be enabled by default
Virtual Desktop is available through the Oculus Quest store for £14.99 GBP. Obviously, it should go without saying that you’ll need a VR-capable PC to run any of the awesome videogames you own (or want to buy) without the worry of a cable. And some decent WiFi without too many obstructions to ensure a smooth gameplay experience.
VRFocus will continue its coverage of Virtual Desktop, reporting back with the latest updates.
Today solo-developer Guy Godin released version 1.8 of Virtual Desktop which includes a wide variety of improvements and new content including improved VR latency, a performance overlay feature for VR game streaming, and compatibility fixes.
According to Godin’s comments on Reddit, this update should improve latency by about 10ms when streaming VR games to a standalone headset like the Quest or Quest 2. The “Performance Overlay” option allows you to monitor framerate and latency for anything you’re streaming. Compatibility issues should also be resolved when streaming VR games like Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons from Steam, and more.
Here are the full release notes according to Godin:
Added new Modern Apartment environments
Added Performance overlay option in the Streaming tab
Added Reset to defaults button in the Streaming tab
Reduced latency when streaming VR games
Displayed VR latency is now more accurate and represents the total motion-to-photon latency
Virtual desktop microphone no longer gets disabled on disconnect
Fixed game compatibility with: Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons (Steam), Hellblade, Rez Infinite, Bigscreen (Steam), Pulsar Lost Colony, Propagation VR
The most excited bit to me though is the new ‘Modern Apartment’ environment with three different ambient settings, including a fully animated cityscape background. Not even the backgrounds in Oculus Home are animated like this. If only there was a way to port this in as my default Oculus Home environment to replace Cyber City.
What do you think of this update? Let us know down in the comments below!
Today solo-developer Guy Godin released version 1.8 of Virtual Desktop which includes a wide variety of improvements and new content including improved VR latency, a performance overlay feature for VR game streaming, and compatibility fixes.
According to Godin’s comments on Reddit, this update should improve latency by about 10ms when streaming VR games to a standalone headset like the Quest or Quest 2. The “Performance Overlay” option allows you to monitor framerate and latency for anything you’re streaming. Compatibility issues should also be resolved when streaming VR games like Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons from Steam, and more.
Here are the full release notes according to Godin:
Added new Modern Apartment environments
Added Performance overlay option in the Streaming tab
Added Reset to defaults button in the Streaming tab
Reduced latency when streaming VR games
Displayed VR latency is now more accurate and represents the total motion-to-photon latency
Virtual desktop microphone no longer gets disabled on disconnect
Fixed game compatibility with: Stormland, The Climb, Star Wars: Squadrons (Steam), Hellblade, Rez Infinite, Bigscreen (Steam), Pulsar Lost Colony, Propagation VR
The most excited bit to me though is the new ‘Modern Apartment’ environment with three different ambient settings, including a fully animated cityscape background. Not even the backgrounds in Oculus Home are animated like this. If only there was a way to port this in as my default Oculus Home environment to replace Cyber City.
What do you think of this update? Let us know down in the comments below!
This week Facebook announced the launch of cloud-streamed games from Facebook Gaming. These are games which are rendered in the cloud and then streamed to your computer. Cloud-based gaming has been seen by the industry at large as a way to make games more widely accessible by making them playable on less powerful hardware. Facebook is also betting that one day they’ll be able to do the same for VR.
Facebook Gaming’s new cloud streaming functionality doesn’t support VR today, but it’s clear that the company is eyeing it up as part of its roadmap.
Not only is the company’s just-launched cloud streaming service headed by Jason Rubin, a former Oculus executive, but VR cloud streaming is being talked about at the highest levels of the company.
Responding to a question during Facebook’s most recent quarterly earnings call this week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the intersection of Facebook’s cloud gaming and VR initiatives:
“Over the longer term, I think the VR piece will obviously come into [our gaming strategy] as well. Some of the cloud gaming stuff that we’re doing will, of course, be useful for VR as well, and we’re building a big community around that on Oculus. But [our cloud gaming service]… I do think will be a very exciting growth opportunity and ability to offer a lot of innovation over the coming years,” Zuckerberg said.
Rubin joined Oculus in 2014 as was a key spokesperson for the company’s VR before his role expanded into Facebook’s broader gaming initiatives | Image courtesy Jason Rubin
Jason Rubin, the former Oculus executive turned ‘VP of Play’ at Facebook, laid out the company’s cloud-gaming vision this week, opening with a not-so-secretive jab at Google’s cloud streaming service, Stadia:
We believe in the long-term future of cloud gaming, but we aren’t going to try to wow you with the wonders of our data centers, compression algorithms, resolutions, or frames per second. Cloud game streaming for the masses still has a way to go, and it’s important to embrace both the advantages and the reality of the technology rather than try to oversell where it’ll be in the future.
Rubin also touched on the reality of game streaming latency as it stands today, knowing that competitive and VR games share exceptionally demanding latency requirements which the service isn’t ready to handle just yet.
It’s critical for us to start with latency-tolerant games so we can deliver a good experience for players across a variety of devices. For the purposes of our beta, that includes genres like sports, card, simulation, and strategy games. This is cloud gaming after all, so even with latency-tolerant games players may notice some glitches. […]
As our beta progresses and cloud technology scales, we’ll increase the variety of game genres. That expansion will start in 2021 with the addition of action and adventure games.
I can tell you this: Nobody is banking on cloud processing making standalone VR headsets viable. We have to make them viable with the chipsets that are in them. But in the long run, cloud solves a lot of problems because it most effectively puts the processing power where it’s needed. Now there’s latency issues, resolution issues, frame rate issues, tons of issues. And it’s a hell of a lot more uncomfortable when it’s a frame that’s right in front of your face than it is when you miss a frame on a TV that’s across the room. So all of these things have to be solved, but no one thinks it’s impossible. It’s a hypothetical that can be done but it’s not coming anytime soon. It is very, very complicated.
Elsewhere he added, “ultimately we’ll throw those processors in a server farm somewhere and stream to your headset. And a lot of people are going to say, ‘Oh my god, that’s a million years away.’ It’s not a million. It’s not five. It’s somewhere between.”
So while we don’t expect that the company will be rolling out VR game streaming in the immediate future, the Facebook is actively positioning itself to be offer the service further down the road.
As the only company in the consumer space with a complete tech stack for VR cloud streaming, the strategy seems sound. While other companies like Amazon, Google, NVIDIA, and Microsoft are building out their own cloud game streaming services, none of them have both a standalone VR headset and a major VR ecosystem for a complete end-to-end solution.
NVIDIA plans to launch its CloudXR service on Amazon Web Services in early 2021, allowing enterprises to stream AR and VR content to tethered and standalone VR headsets. While the initial use-cases focus on visualization and collaboration, the same service could underpin a consumer-facing XR streaming service in the future.
This week Nvidia announced that it will make its CloudXR streaming service available via Amazon Web Services in early 2021. Nvidia says the CloudXR system can stream any OpenVR/SteamVR content to end users on Windows or Android systems without any special modification to the streamed application.
AWS is one of the most prevalent cloud computing platforms in the world, acting as the back-end web infrastructure for millions of customers. By offering CloudXR through AWS, Nvidia is making it easy for any company to spin up their own XR streaming solution for whatever their needs may be.
At the outset, Nvidia is pitching CloudXR for enterprise use-cases like visualization and collaboration, enabling companies to stream high-quality AR and VR content to employee’s headsets without needing to equip each user with a powerful VR-capable PC. Because the heavy-duty rendering happens in the cloud, CloudXR’s aim is to run high-fidelity VR content low-powered PCs, laptops, and even standalone headsets like Oculus Quest and Vive Focus.
Although enterprise XR applications are the initial use-case, the move also brings us one big step closer to a consumer cloud-streaming XR service. A company wanting to offer such a service to consumers could theoretically build their platform on top of CloudXR hosted on AWS.
While the idea of streaming XR content from the cloud has been around for many years now, Nvidia’s CloudXR may well be the most mature and scalable solution available to date given its compatibility with unmodified OpenVR/SteamVR content and its upcoming deployability through AWS.
