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.
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.