NVIDIA Announces CloudXR for AR/VR Rendering of SteamVR Applications Over 5G

At MWC Los Angeles this week, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated the company’s CloudXR platform which is made to stream cloud-rendered AR and VR content over 5G connections. Built to support SteamVR/OpenVR content out of the box, Nvidia says it will release a CloudXR SDK to enable companies to offer AR and VR content from the cloud. Nvidia wants to leverage GPU-based cloud infrastructures to enable businesses to render high-end AR and VR visuals remotely and deliver them to customers over 5G. The idea is to remove VR’s high-end hardware barrier by rendering the visuals in the cloud and streaming them to a host device which itself doesn’t need particularly beefy or expensive hardware. Nvidia already offers a very similar service called GeForce Now, but it’s for traditional games rather than VR. Now the company says it has developed a cloud-rendering pipeline, specifically supporting SteamVR/OpenVR content, which the company is calling CloudXR. Rather than offer this service directly to customers (as with GeForce Now), Nvidia is positioning CloudXR as a set of tools which other businesses can use to bring AR/VR streaming to their customers. This approach makes sense because one of the key pieces to this puzzle is a 5G network (thanks to its potential for low latency) and Nvidia hopes that carriers who are building out 5G networks will want to offer CloudXR streaming as a way to attract customers to their networks.