Background

The global XR market is forecast to reach more than 30 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, rising to close to 300 billion U.S. dollars by 2024. [1]

However, the VR graphics challenges are fundamental. VR graphics display requires very high pixel rendering throughput and must maintain very low latency. As the figure indicates, the full high definition display in VR needs to be 7-8 times rendering throughput than traditional 1920*1080P. And the workflow time from HMD poses update to GPU computation to HMD display flash should be limited to within 20 ms to not cause user motion sickness and nausea. [2] So, under the professional scenarios (such as design, medical, architecture, and manufacturing) people need to use data lines connecting headsets with PCs. This limits mobility, breaks immersion experience, interrupts creativity, and may cause potential safety concerns. [4]

Therefore, many developers choose to use VR all-in-one headsets to solve these limitations. By October 26th, 2021, Gravity Sketch is the world’s first immersive real-time 3D design platform to create and communicate [7] and also the only 3D design platform landed in the Quest platform.

Why is it a good use of XR?

Designing, iterating and commercialising yet-to-be-realised products – be it a car, a pair of shoes, or a chair – is incredibly complex. It requires a great deal of back-and-forth between designers, engineers and manufacturing teams, and still heavily relies on pen-and-paper sketches. While the advent of CAD software has helped to digitise development cycles, a lack of tools for real-time collaboration and iteration between globally-distributed teams, particularly when communicating and creating in 3D, creates a number of inefficiencies throughout a product’s design process. This results in longer time frames when bringing a product to market, and incurs significant costs for manufacturers.

Combining intuitive design software with remote working tools, Gravity Sketch allows users to think and create in 3D while also bringing real-time collaboration to the front of the design process, enabling teams to revolutionise their workflow. This greatly streamlines product development cycles as well as reducing costs: in the automotive sector, an estimated €43 million can be saved by manufacturers when designing a new vehicle using the platform. [5]

Who are its intended users?

What are the issues with it?

1. Limited processing power

2. Insufficient memory for enterprise datasets

3. Low-fidelity display

Possible Solution

As a matter of fact, the prices for graphic cards are rocket-high now and the need is to use a radio signal to replace the data line. So I prefer to provide cloud computing as the solution for the issues above.

I choose Nvidia CloudXR SDK as an example to illustrate the way to stream graphics-intensive XR to one or more devices. The VR application is running on the server-side. Then, the GPU encodes the messages and transmits them over the Internet to the client-side. The client-side uses radio signals (5G or Wifi) to get the data and then decode the video and audio signals and present them on the all-in-one VR device. Many cloud computing companies such as Nividia have already started to provide cloud computing services to enterprise users. I estimate that cloud computing in VR will soon be provided to the mass. Until then, professional users can really get rid of the dangerous data line.