NVIDIA reveals VRWorks Audio for better VR audio

Over at the GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA showed off a couple of new technologies. First up we have the release of VRWorks Audio, a new piece of the company's VRWorks software development kit. This feature enables real-time ray tracing of audio in virtual environments, to give users a better VR gaming experience:

Traditional VR audio provides an accurate 3D position of the audio source within a virtual environment. However, sound in the real world reflects more than just the location of the source — it’s also a function of the dimensions and material properties of the physical environment.

NVIDIA VRWorks Audio helps create a truly immersive environment by modeling sound propagation phenomena, such as reflection, refraction and diffraction. And it does so in real time, thanks to the massive processing power of GPUs.

Using NVIDIA OptiX ray-tracing technology, VRWorks Audio traces the path of sound in real time, delivering physically accurate audio that reflects the size, shape and material properties of the virtual environment.

It’s the only hardware-accelerated and path-traced audio solution that creates a complete acoustic image of the environment in real time without requiring any “pre-baked” knowledge of the scene. As the scene is loaded by the application, the acoustic model is built and updated on the fly. And audio effect filters are generated and applied on the sound source waveforms.

The software release consists of a set of C-APIs for integration into any engine or application, and an integration for Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 that’s now available on GitHub.

GTC attendees can visit the VR Village to experience a live demonstration of VRWorks Audio technology, as well as the SDK integrated into OPTIS’ HIM VR design application.

At the same time, NVIDIA also showcased VRWorks 360 Video, a new SDK that enables real-time 4K 360-degrees video capture, stitching and streaming.

In addition, we’re demoing an upcoming release of the VRWorks 360 Video SDK that enables real-time stitching in stereo. Using two Quadro P6000 GPUs, the SDK can stitch eight 4K cameras in stereo as demonstrated with Z CAM’s V1 PRO VR camera system.

“The fact that NVIDIA manages to stitch 4K 360 stereoscopic video in real time, making livestreaming possible, changes the production pipeline and enables entirely new use cases in VR,” said Kinson Loo, CEO of Z CAM.