Nvidia Cloud XR has been announced at MWC Los Angeles. Company CEO Jensen Huang took to the stage to demonstrate a new platform that would allow 5G VR streaming and AR streaming, allowing companies to offer high-end gaming content without requiring beefy systems on the consumer end.
As reported by Road to VR, a “cloud-rendering pipeline” has been developed called Cloud XR. This isn’t going to be a service that will be offered to consumers per se; rather, Nvidia is marketing it to companies as a way to deliver VR/AR content to their customers. From a gaming standpoint, however, this can be particularly exciting.
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While Nvidia is almost certainly eyeing the potential for this to be used for things like business meetings—imagine sharing a high-resolution, 3D model of an upcoming car to ten separate board rooms around the world—it also has plenty of potential for gaming applications. You see, Cloud XR was specifically designed to work with SteamVR and OpenVR content. In theory, pretty much any VR games on the market today which makes use of either Steam VR or Open VR—that’s currently 4,383 items on Steam and rising—could be plugged into this system and made to work.
It sounds exciting, but now we have to bring in the buzzkill: This was an early demo of Cloud XR. It wasn’t entirely clear whether this was an honest-to-goodness demo featuring actual, working infrastructure or a simulation of how the finished product could work. It’s easy enough for them to do the latter, but if this was an actual demonstration of the tech in action, it was pretty impressive.
There also hasn’t yet been any mention of what sort of latency requirements would be necessary. This is being billed as a service that could be done over a 5G network, so the odds are it probably won’t be too bandwidth-intensive. Still, I’d wager that people out in the sticks on DSL internet might have a tough time making use of this (hopefully) upcoming service.
