A blog about virtual reality, startup and stuff

There is one last experience I want to tell you about from my trip to AWE USA a few months ago: the time I visited XCOM Labs to try its remote rendering solution!

A few friends of mine suggested I visit the booth of XCOM Labs, so I booked a meeting to try their solution in one of their private rooms. As soon as I arrived, an employee made me wear a HoloLens and walk around to see a complete baseball stadium scene rendered around me via servers that were there in the room with me. We are talking about remote rendering, so the servers were rendering the scene and sending it via local network to my headset, which acted as a dull display. This experience had everything I could expect from a remote rendering solution: the scene was much more complex than anything the HoloLens could handle, and the rendering latency was low, so almost not noticeable. When I removed the HoloLens, I noticed that it had a special antenna connected, which I guess was part of the networking solution I was shown.

After that, I was required to try the VR demo, in which I could wear a Vive Focus 3, always with some special network accessory attached, and enter into a sort of physical square ring and see around me a very complex virtual panorama, with some plants growing if I went around waving my hands. Again, I noticed that the remote rendering was working well, with good visuals and low latency. When I removed the headset, I could say that the experience had been good, but I did not understand what should surprise me: the rendering servers were not even in the cloud but there, in the room with us, so I had not experienced anything different than Virtual Desktop.

I was almost leaving the room, very puzzled, when I was introduced to someone in the company that actually explained to me what I had just experienced. And yes, he told me that at the end of the day, the result is quite similar to Virtual Desktop, because what the company does is streaming the rendered scene from a computer to an AR or VR headset. But what I should have looked at is how the network was done.

This employee told me that there was not a simple Wi-Fi network in the room, but a complex wireless network that works with unlicensed millimeter wave (mmW), which is much more powerful than Wi-Fi 6. The network was composed of a grid of many small access points installed on the ceiling, and while I moved in the room, the system made the roaming between the various access points so that I was always served by the ones that were the best for me in that moment. This system has been developed so that it can serve many people in the same room: with Virtual Desktop, you can’t reliably stream to more than one person, while with this system, you can perform remote rendering for 8 people together in the same room. And if you increment the number of streaming servers, the number of people can also increase to dozens enjoying remote rendering in the same moment. This system guarantees that there are no interferences between the different streamings, and so every user lives his experience at its best.

XCOM Labs has worked on all the layers of this solution: the network architecture, the hardware, and the streaming protocols. They are not aiming at substituting Virtual Desktop, but they want to offer this solution to companies that may need to offer remote rendering to multiple employees at the same time in the same room. One good example could be LBVR (location-based VR) venues, which could so substitute backpack PCs with Vive Focus 3 devices and remote rendering. In fact, they are already partners of THE VOID, with which they developed the last demo I tried.

I’ve found it to be a cool solution.

Since it is my last post about AWE, let me cast a ray of visibility on some companies I have met there, but about which I do have not enough material to write a full article:

I hope you have enjoyed all these articles of mine about AWE! Next year when I’ll come back I’ll tell you even more stories from there…

… but wait, there is a final surprise about AWE! I have still to publish the article about my tests with the Mojo Vision contact lenses! It’s coming soon and I’m sure you will like it… subscribe to my newsletter to be sure not to miss it 😉

(Header image by XCOM Labs)

AR/VR developer, startupper, zombie killer. Sometimes I pretend I can blog, but actually I've no idea what I'm doing. I tried to change the world with my startup Immotionar, offering super-awesome full body virtual reality, but now the dream is over. But I'm not giving up: I've started an AR/VR agency called New Technology Walkers with which help you in realizing your XR dreams with our consultancies (Contact us if you need a project done!)

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