With inspiration straight out of Star Trek, the Nvidia Holodeck is a virtual reality design environment created to allow collaboration between designers and developers to build realistic models in real time. The new tool provides a physics engine and photo realism to show how designs may truly look and function.
In a demonstration working alongside Koenigsegg, the Regera supercar received a design review to show off the pure level of detail provided and real-time design changes that could be made. Instrument panels, engine parts, and other normally hard-to-examine parts were shown with great detail. Multiple lighting options showed off the appearance during night, day, sunset, and other common driving conditions.
One of the more impressive feats of the demonstration is that the life-size 3D model used did not require any scaling or simplification. All 50 million polygons, rendered using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4, required for the Regera model were used during the live presentation without any reduction or compression methods.
Nvidia suggests that designers, architects, and content creators may gain the largest benefits from Holodeck but does not rule out enthusiasts. There is currently no information on the hardware required to run Holodeck, but rest assured that it will require some serious graphics power to handle real-time manipulation similar to anything seen in the demo.