NVIDIA has introduced the NVIDIA RealityServer platform for cloud computing, a powerful combination of GPUs and software that streams interactive, photo-realistic 3D applications to any web connected PC, laptop, netbook and smart phone. The announcement was made at the start of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday 20th October.

The NVIDIA RealityServer is the culmination of nearly 40 collective years of hardware and software engineering by NVIDIA and mental images. This system enables developers to create a new generation of consumer and enterprise 3D web applications, all with remarkable levels of photorealism; Automobile product engineering teams will be able to securely share and visualize complex 3D models of cars under different lighting and environmental conditions; Architects and their clients will be able to review sophisticated architectural models, rendered in different settings, including day or night; Online shoppers will be able to interactively design home interiors, rearrange furniture, and view how fabrics will drape, all with perfectly accurate lighting.

The NVIDIA RealityServer platform is comprised of an NVIDIA Tesla RS GPU-based server running RealityServer software from mental images. While photo-realistic imagery has traditionally taken hours or days to create, this first-of-its-kind, integrated solution streams images of photo-realistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.

"This is one giant leap closer to the goal of real-time photo-realistic visual computing for the masses," said Dan Vivoli, senior vice president, NVIDIA. "mental images fully embraced the concept of GPU co-processing to enable Interactive photo-realism anywhere, any time - something that was science fiction just yesterday."
RealityServer software uses mental images iray technology, the world's first physically correct ray-tracing renderer that employs the massively parallel CUDA architecture of NVIDIA GPUs to create stunningly accurate photo-realistic images by simulating the physics of light in its interaction with matter. Because ray tracing is one of the most demanding computational problems, iray technology is designed to take advantage of the parallel computing power of NVIDIA Tesla.

"Everyone should experience the web the way they experience the world, in 3D," said Rolf Herken, CEO and CTO of mental images. "RealityServer offers extraordinary opportunities and far-reaching implications for businesses and consumers, enabling us to interact with 3D content in the form and manner that our brains expect."


The NVIDIA RealityServer platform will be available November 30, 2009. Tesla RS configurations start at eight GPUs, and scale to support increasing numbers of simultaneous users.
A developer edition of RealityServer 3.0 software will be down-loadable free of charge, including the right to deploy non-commercial applications November 30, 2009.