Cloud graphics company, OTOY Inc., this week announced, OctaneVR, a groundbreaking production tool for cinematic virtual reality, that enables content creators to effortlessly surpass the constraints of traditional CGI and filmed media, in order to render hyper-realistic cinematic experience at the maximum possible fidelity demanded by consumer VR and AR devices coming to market this year.
OctaneVR — Ground Breaking VR and AR Tool
OctaneVR will be released on Windows, OSX and Linux for free for an unspecified period of time as a means of encouraging artists and commercial content creators to experiment freely with OTOY’s VR and AR cinematic rendering tools, and advance awareness and ideas in this nascent medium.
OctaneVR supports one-click exporting of VR images and animations in a format that can be directly viewed with the Oculus 360 Photos and Oculus 360 Videos apps on the Samsung GALAXY Gear VR. Navigable VR content and menus created with Octane Lua scripts can be exported as an ORBX file from OctaneVR and viewed through OTOY’s ORBX Media Player app on GearVR.
01 – OTOY’s OctaneVR is the world’s first production-ready renderer for VR, AR and Holographic Cinema.
“Virtual and augmented reality is enabling phenomenal new experiences in education, entertainment, and gaming, but we’re really only at the beginning of this movement,” said Jules Urbach, Founder and CEO, OTOY. “With OctaneVR we’re putting OTOY’s VR technology in the hands of everyone, at no cost, to see what incredible experiences can be created in this medium, once artists are limited only by their artistry and imagination. OctaneVR can be used to render film and CG content, on par with the commercial version of OctaneRender, but we are betting that once people get a glimpse of what can be done in VR, they are not going to want to see their content experiences any other way.”
The ORBX Media Player app is designed to work in tandem with OctaneVR during the production process in order to let artists test live VR content as they change a scene in real time. The ORBX media player fully supports commercial VR content published on the open web by major studios, such as Warner Bros. including the highly anticipated Batman: The Animated Series VR project OTOY is building for Warner Bros., as well as live VR event streams such as the hockey game OTOY recently produced in cooperation with the NHL.
The ORBX Media Player will work with the Samsung GALAXY Gear VR, with support for Microsoft HoloLens and HTML5 WebVR coming in Q4 2015.
Availability
OctaneVR will be available for download on OTOY’s website in April. The ORBX Media Player application be updated on the Gear VR Store simultaneously.
Architosh Analysis
OTOY is one of the hottest new companies in the world of visualization, 3D technology, GPU acceleration in visualization and cloud computing solutions. Backed by an impressive board, encouraged by key partners like Autodesk, and led by the driven Jules Urbach, its young founder and CEO, this announcement, along with the series related to it, is one of the more stunning news items of 2015 thus far.
At the Gaming Developers Conference held just a week ago, one of the five hottest news items at that event was the announcement of more top-flight VR headsets, adding to the already existent Oculus Rift. Beyond gamers, VR hardware gear is gaining deep value within specific industries where virtual reality experiences aid industry progress. Architecture is just one example, among many. Clearly the year 2015 is starting to shape up as the year of VR in the CAD/DCC industries as markets look to capitalize on new hardware paired with an ever-growing pipeline of software applications. This new OctaneVR is just accelerating the “push to VR” button faster.