This is NVIDIA's Project Holodeck [Release and Demo]

This week at GTC 2017, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed Project Holodeck to the masses. This system "brings visually stunning, collaborative, and shareable VR to everyone." The first demonstration had several users standing near a vehice rendered with 50,000,000 polygons – that's inside a virtual, shared space. The vehicle was a $1.9-million dollar supercar showed off via Christian Koenigsegg.

Demo One

The first demonstration made it clear that NVIDIA is pushing VR as a real possibility for the average person in the future. Not just for gamers, that is, and not just for people who want to go virtual alone at home. Instead, NVIDIA is pushing the idea that VR can be not only collaborative, but expansive and photo-realistic, too.

In the first demo, Christian Koenigsegg himself appeared as one of several avatars dressed in robo-wear. They wouldn't look out of place in the next TRON movie, basically. They're all standing in what's basically The Construct from The Matrix.

Above you'll see several scenes from The Matrix (1999 movie) which show The Construct. NVIDIA didn't mention The Matrix in their demo, specifically – but the parallels are obvious. You're standing inside a computer program and you can see a 1,500 horsepower Koenigsegg vehicle that can, in real life, move at 250-miles per hour.



Would that this car were slime green or pink chrome, it wouldn't look out of place in The Joker's garage. Also it's a hybrid car with no gears that's made of carbon fiber – which we find out thanks to an explosion that happens within the Holodeck. The demonstration has the car expand into thousands of pieces as Huang requests it. It's a rather impressive showing for the software – now if only it'll really, truly work as well as this suggests in the first release.

When can I use the Holodeck?

It'll be September of 2017 by the time NVIDIA releases a first version of this software for the public. No word yet on whether there'll be any Alpha or Beta trials – but we wouldn't be surprised if there were.

UPDATE: Apparently the September 2017 release will be the "early access" program. So there you go – no x-ray specs for multi-million-dollar vehicles for us until we're closer to Halloween!