SIGGRAPH 2016 is underway, and as is traditional for NVIDIA, the company has brought with it a raft of professional and prosumer to announce. And for those involved in the rapidly expanding world of 360 video and film, they’re announcing a new VRWorks 360 Video SDK which they claim will allow you to “Capture, Stitch, and Stream VR Content in Real-Time with VRWorks 360 Video SDK.”
Capturing VR video is challenging, but assembling and editing multiple videos into something that can be viewed immersive can be mind-numbingly challenging. This is all made worse by the fact that industry tools and software are running to catch up with this exploding yet fledgling industry. Furthermore, even when you have your tool chain locked down, you’re going to need a stack of horsepower to handle the editing and stitching process.
NVIDIA have announced that they’re aiming to offer the VR industry a way to harness GPU power with a view to accelerating the assembly and editing process. The company claims that, when partnered with its latest Quadro graphics cards, VRWorks 360 can help supporting software deliver the ability to multiple high resolution video feeds and stitch them in realtime, allowing correction and adjustment for the characteristics of your camera rig, custom of otherwise. It says that feeds from up to 32 cameras can be manipulated and edited in realtime, although that claim carries a broad and heavy disclaimer about your machine’s general system performance (you’ll need some pretty extensive disk IO if nothing else).
“Capturing and stitching 360 video is time consuming and computationally demanding.” says Masaki Miyanohara, CTO of STRIVR, “NVIDIA’s VRWorks 360 Video SDK will help accelerate STRIVR’s workflows, delivering real-time, high quality 360 video.”
The system is on show at SIGGRAPH in Anaheim California this week, the show itself running from 24-28 July. NVIDIA say they’ll have a 4K camera rig on hand to demonstrate that real-time stitching at the show.
Road to VR are at SIGGRAPH 2016 and will bring you the latest news througout the week.