ZeroLight today announced one of the world's first commercial, boundless XR over 5G virtual reality (VR) experiences, created in collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies and NVIDIA. Built on state-of-the-art technologies — including NVIDIA CloudXR™, NVIDIA Quadro® Virtual Datacenter Workstation, NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs, and Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ XR2 — boundless XR is an optimised, 5G-edge-streaming platform.

The showcase demo is a fully wireless, 5G, six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) standalone VR experience that enables consumers to configure and explore a range of Pagani vehicles, with a selection of paint colours, alloys, and interior trims to choose from. The experience is enabled via on-device 6DOF head/controller tracking and advanced reprojection, with all content rendered on NVIDIA RTX edge servers and sent back over a 5G network to the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ XR2 5G-enabled reference design headset.

This breakthrough boundless XR over 5G concept demonstrates the significant advantages and efficiencies that 5G will bring to XR applications. With latencies 10x lower than existing networks and multi-gigabit per second peak data rates (Qualcomm), 5G will enable complex XR experiences to be delivered via distributed processing. By enabling distributed processing and keeping latency-sensitive processing on the device and compute-intensive rendering on the edge cloud, boundless XR over 5G gives mass-market customers access to enterprise-level processing power. This is enhanced further by utilising the edge cloud, where latency is reduced by physically locating cloud servers closer to the end users, rather than using centralised servers that cover large areas.

We are now in the era of 5G which will transform how the world connects and communicates. With distributed processing from boundless XR over 5G, XR will see one of the most dramatic 5G transformations. Industrial-level processing power will be available on-demand with ultra-reliable and low latencies, revolutionizing XR's potential for both the consumer and the enterprise.

_{Brian Vogelsang, senior director of product management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.}

The impact of this advancement in retail settings like automotive dealerships will be profound. Dealers will be able to avoid significant investments in the costly equipment that would be required to render professional XR experiences locally, enabling them to make additional savings from reducing power usage and set up time. In addition, many 5G-enabled VR headsets, like the Snapdragon XR2 reference design, feature inside-out tracking, which removes the requirement for additional user-tracking hardware, enabling dealers to simply unbox a headset and transport customers into an ultra-high-resolution virtual world, free from any wires or tethers.

Photorealistic VR has traditionally been constrained by the local hardware that is rendering it. Today, we are demonstrating how the combined power of the cloud and 5G means we can shift the render requirement into the edge cloud and stream incredibly sophisticated XR solutions wirelessly, opening the door to a new age of quality-high, hardware-light XR content.

_{Chris O'Connor, Technical Director, ZeroLight}

The concept is a collaborative effort from some of the world's leading technology innovators. ZeroLight's VR content is rendered entirely at the edge on NVIDIA RTX Servers. This content is then streamed using NVIDIA's CloudXR via a 5G network to the Snapdragon XR2 reference design headset. This 5G-enabled headset features enhanced re-projection techniques that enable it to reduce the perceived latency even further. It does this by re-projecting the cloud-rendered experience data within the headset to ensure it accurately matches the user's current position (rather than their position a few milliseconds ago, when the render request was sent to the cloud servers).

NVIDIA CloudXR gives companies access to the transformative computational power of our edge-based, VR-ready GPUs," said David Weinstein, director of XR, NVIDIA. "Minimizing perceived latency through the combination of CloudXR and the Snapdragon XR2 is essential to delivering the high-fidelity, immersive XR experiences customers expect from 5G.

The roll out of 5G has already begun in countries around the world, and it is estimated that there will be 1 billion 5G users by 2023 (CNET). As this technology develops and becomes more readily available, the cloud will play an increasingly important role in visualisation solutions of all types. This will drive an industry-wide move towards the edge cloud model of computing, cutting response times further and, in turn, enhancing the quality of available experiences with advancements like real-time raytracing.

Contact
Jack Nove
Marketing Executive, ZeroLight
T: +44(0) 191 485 0505
E: jack.nove@zerolight.com

About ZeroLight
ZeroLight is a cloud-based 3D visualisation specialist offering car-configuration and content-production solutions to the automotive industry. Designed to enhance touchpoints across the vehicle-shopping journey, these globally scalable solutions deliver competitive advantages to clients by driving engagement, higher specification sales, and lower content-production costs. For more information about ZeroLight, go to  zerolight.com

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