Interactive Photorealism for the Web

migenius™ RealityServer® enables the development and deployment of interactive and photorealistic applications and web services, allowing product designers, architects and consumers to easily visualise 3D scenes with remarkable realism.

The RealityServer® platform is a powerful combination of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs and 3D web services software that delivers interactive, photorealistic applications over the web, enabling product designers, architects and consumers to easily visualise 3D scenes with remarkable realism.

Featuring iray® photorealistic rendering technology, RealityServer is the first web services platform that enables anyone to interact remotely with complex, 3D models and environments, from any perspective and under customisable lighting conditions.

The RealityServer platform runs in GPU-based cloud computing environment, accessible using web-connected PCs, netbooks, and smart phones, enabling 3D web applications to dynamically scale based on utilisation requirements.

Interactive Collaborative Environments

RealityServer enables immersive 3D web environment for users such as:

• Online shoppers to interactively design home interiors and customise apparel choices
• Product engineering teams to share and visualise complex 3D designs
• Architects and clients to review sophisticated architectural models

Realistic Rendering

iray is the world’s first interactive and physically correct, photorealistic rendering solution. With iray, users can quickly create life-like images of their creations by using intuitive, real world approaches and interactively exploring their results through the processing power of the massively parallel CUDA™ architecture of NVIDIA GPUs to create images that show how lighting, texture and reflections change in real-time.

Software

RealityServer software is a revolutionary web services platform enabling a new category of web applications to interact with highly complex 3D models, in life-like quality, on any web enabled device. Unlike solutions needing to send models to every user’s machine, RealityServer maintains and processes its data remotely, allowing it to flexibly scale to meet application needs while enabling impactful collaborative opportunities. With RealityServer, critical design decisions can now be made anywhere.

RealityServer applications leverage industry standard technologies for custom user interfaces hosting dynamic image streams coming from the server. Virtually any interactive technology that connects to HTTP can control RealityServer – from HTML, Flash and AJAX in browsers, to Adobe AIR or PDF in documents, to applications for the Apple iPhone. Flexibility continues to the server, where custom capabilities can be added for new possibilities, and integration with standard server technologies enable enterprise operations.

In practice, RealityServer provides professionals unprecedented freedom for interacting with complex 3D data, while bringing interactive realism to any user for the first time. Already deployed privately within numerous Fortune 100 companies, RealityServer’s new web services tier now makes it easy for the web development community to bring robust 3D to their solutions, while making their results intuitive and engaging with the photorealistic results of iray rendering technology. With RealityServer, energy resources can be explored, custom vehicles configured, design reviews conducted, and home improvements planned – all from the likes of any web-enabled device.

• 3D City Modeling

  

  RealityServer’s scalable architecture makes it ideal for hosting even the most complex city models. Applications that use RealityServer as a platform stream the rendered frames to the output device – regardless of model size and server-client transfer rate. The interactivity of the application is thus only limited by the network latency.

• Architectural Design

  

  RealityServer is the ideal platform for centrally storing and visualising architectural data throughout the entire design life cycle. Its scalable architecture allows even huge models to be displayed and shared with the highest degree of detail.

• Product Styling and Design

  

  RealityServer’s flexible rendering architecture supports product-driven application environments that can be operated from any location, even on client’s site, without downloading the actual 3D model. While keeping 3D assets secure on a remote server, RealityServer provides unmatched levels of realism using iray rendering technology, to interactively show how lighting, texture and reflections change - enabling digital prototypes to easily substitute real-life product prototyping. Designers and decision makers can visualise down to the finest details with interactive, photorealistic quality. Plus, these lifelike prototypes can easily be turned into high-quality print-ready images.

• Merchandising

  

  RealityServer assists with centralised planning of store layouts and merchandising projects. Web-enabled and independent of the viewing device, applications can serve a wide variety of tasks, such as modeling customer flows, marketing shelf space or communicating point-of-purchase designs.

• Marketing Collaboration Tools

  

  Whether configuring a car, a kitchen, or an entire family home – RealityServer is the platform of choice for a whole new generation of online marketing tools. RealityServer allows the creation of multiple product impressions, from real-time, customised 3D product selection to repurposed 3D images inside individualised brochures.

• Space Planning

  

  Instead of relying on images rendered with traditional technologies, which could take several hours, with RealityServer, architects and interior designers can present their models to a client while discussing over a conference call. A client can shift to different viewpoints or even interactively walk through the space. Using iray technology, it is easy to iterate using different times of day and furnishing options to quickly go from idea to proposal.

Operating systems supported

The following Operating systems are supported with RealityServer 3.2:

Operating System	64 bit	32 bit
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2 (*)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux6®
CentOS Linux 6

Only on the GPUs listed below and limited to the iray renderer. OpenGL rendering is not supported.

• Tesla S1070
• Tesla S2050
• Tesla M1060
• Tesla M2050
• Tesla M2070
• Tesla M2070-Q
• Tesla M2075

System Memory

All hosts forming one RealityServer cluster should have the same amount of memory. The memory recommendations apply to both, system memory and GPU memory, since renderers may switch within an application. Minimum: 2 GB Recommended: 8 GB and higher

Hardware Supported

CPU

RealityServer® must use a 64-bit CPU. Multicore CPUs are supported.

GPU

Graphics cards are optional; they are needed only if the GPU or Sketch renderer are used by applications or the iray renderer in CUDA mode. The following graphics cards are supported:

Quadro

• NVIDIA Quadro® K5000
• NVIDIA Quadro® 6000
• NVIDIA Quadro® 5000
• NVIDIA Quadro® 4000

QuadroFX

• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 5800
• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 5600
• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 5500
• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4800
• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4700 X2
• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 4600
• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 3800
• NVIDIA Quadro® FX 3700

QuadroPlex

• NVIDIA QuadroPlex® 2200 S4
• NVIDIA QuadroPlex® 2200 D2

Tesla

• NVIDIA Tesla® K20X
• NVIDIA Tesla® K20
• NVIDIA Tesla® K10
• NVIDIA Tesla® C1060
• NVIDIA Tesla® C2050
• NVIDIA Tesla® C2070
• NVIDIA Tesla® C2075
• NVIDIA Tesla® M1060
• NVIDIA Tesla® M2050
• NVIDIA Tesla® M2070
• NVIDIA Tesla® M2075
• NVIDIA Tesla® M2090
• NVIDIA Tesla® S1070
• NVIDIA Tesla® S2050

GPU drivers

For correct operation of graphics hardware it is essential to utilise up to date drivers. The following drivers have been tested and are known to work well with RealityServer:

Tesla Cluster Compute (TCC) driver versions and modes provided by NVIDIA are not supported by RealityServer. Detection of multiple GPU devices for use with OpenGL requires the OpenGL GPU Affinity extension.

Network

For clustering Gigabit Ethernet is recommended. For maximum efficiency and usability UDP multicast support is required within the network environment.

Recommended Developer Knowledge

Working knowledge of the chosen client and server technologies being employed by the RealityServer application being designed is assumed. Familiarity with the .mi scene syntax and 3D computer graphics paradigms is useful.

• Web Services

  As a server based platform component, RealityServer is using state of the art Web technologies to deliver high quality images and video stream to all web connected, in particular mobile devices. RealityServer based applications and services can be easily integrated into enterprise systems and made accessible via the Web.

• Autodesk® 3ds Max® Exporter

  

  This exporter is available for Autodesk 3dsMax 2011 and 2012 on 64 and 32 bit Windows Operating systems. This exporter enables you to export a 3dsMax scene into a structured .mi file for reuse in RealityServer. Refer to the included Readme file to learn about usage and functionality. Please feel free to download it and use it. But have in mind that there is no direct support for this piece of software and communication is handled via the RealityServer Open Forum exclusively and under its terms and conditions.

• Web Viewer Example

  

  This is a Adobe® Flash® based viewing application for RealityServer designed to allow users to quickly and easily navigate and view RealityServer server scenes with high performance using the best practices for implementing a RealityServer application. Its goal is to be embeddable and reusable by customers as well as to provide documented source code for how to achieve common application functionality with RealityServer. Feel free to adapt and re-use this code example and application.

• H.264 Video Plugin

  This plugin can be used in conjunction with RealityServer 3.1.1 to enable video streaming for Adobe Flash based applications.

Client Independence

RealityServer stores, manages and processes all 3D content entirely on the server, liberating client hardware from needing any additional storage, memory, or processing power for working with any size data.

Mobility

Handheld devices can be as interactive with massive datasets as workstations, given similar bandwidth and round trip times. Wi-Fi or 3G connections are recommended as bandwidth does impact performance.

Scalable Applications

Processing resources scale economically with additional hardware to meet the data size, performance, image quality and concurrent use needs of applications.

Optimal Performance

RealityServer dynamically distributes the workload across both processers and computers for optimal performance and reliable operation.

Collaboration

RealityServer minimises server impact by sharing a common 3D environment amongst multiple users, enabling powerful collaborative opportunities such as instructional presentations, design sessions, review and approval, and virtual worlds.

Content Re-Use

RealityServer easily scales to handle 3D data at full fidelity, often directly from the Computer Aided Design and Digital Content Creation tools used to create it, avoiding the time-consuming processes of model optimisation and material preparation for its use on devices such as smart phones, netbooks and low-end computers. With support from industry standard tools, custom content can be examined remotely within hours of installing RealityServer.

Data Security

Server-side storage of 3D content inherently protects 3D intellectual property, with clients receiving only images of the 3D content they are interacting with.

Visual Quality Flexibility

Numerous rendering modes are provided allowing developers to adopt the appropriate visual style and interactive performance for their customers – from the fast basics of OpenGL, to the interactive photorealism of iray.

Web Services

RealityServer provides a standards-based, service-oriented tier for building solutions that are independent of programming languages or application development environments. Leveraging standard protocols such as SOAP, REST, JSON, Web developers can quickly build RealityServer applications and integrate them into their enterprise solutions.

Server Compatibility

An internal server is provided that is quite useful for rapid development and internal deployments, while cooperating well with proxy and commercial servers for enterprise solutions.

Server Extensibility

Developers can enhance and extend RealityServer at nearly any level, allowing custom operations to be added via C++ for new capabilities such as creation, modeling, animation, and enterprise connections. Client development is equally flexible, with JavaScript (or ActionScript) having extensive freedom in manipulating the remote 3D world through RealityServer’s extensive API.