Beyond the Looking Glass: Project Alice Using GPUs to Help Businesses Deliver VR

Noitom may spell motion backwards, but the Beijing-based startup is quickly moving forward with plans to deliver a complete virtual reality solution for businesses.

With Project Alice, Noitom has created something that's never been an option for business-to-business initiatives: High-quality, immersive simulation and virtual training environments at a reasonable cost. It's applicable to a variety of industries, such as entertainment, manufacturing, design, marketing and education.

NVIDIA GPUs are key to this effort because the graphics requirements for VR are so high. Users wearing head-mounted displays need systems able to deliver 90 frames per second, with a display for each eye. The NVIDIA Quadro M5000, M6000 and new mobile M5500 come VR ready for the highest quality professional VR experience.

'Working with NVIDIA VR Ready GPUs, we have the power to drive the high frame rates necessary for a fully immersive and believable experience,' says Noitom chief technology officer Dr. Tristan Dai. 'The difference between commercial virtual reality solutions and those that are for consumers at home is that we need to provide a much higher quality experience for businesses.'

Using Project Alice, businesses can create custom, interactive VR experiences for training, simulation, learning and virtual tours of company showrooms and factories. Noitom built Project Alice to deliver five key capabilities:

• Multiple user interaction
• Precise, low-latency hybrid tracking of head-mounted displays and physical objects
• Large tracking dimension
• Body and hand tracking in VR
• Low cost

To do all this, Noitom worked with Chinese media giant Alpha Animation, Swiss VR house Kenzan Studios and mobile phone technology innovator Smartisan to develop software and content support. Global PC leader Lenovo is providing hardware support, and, of course, graphics processing power comes from NVIDIA GPUs.

'We're in the process of adopting NVIDIA VRWorks Multi-Res Shading for even better performance in the next release of Project Alice. Stay tuned,' said Dai.