Introduction

3DEXPERIENCE R2017x brought HTC Vive support to the cloud and on premise installations. While HMDs are unarguably the most sought after VR tech of today, many established design processes rely on traditional Powerwall and CAVE systems, which are also supported with the current release.

HMD mode for HTC Vive
Immersive Wall mode for entry level Powerwalls
CAVE for multi-GPU CAVEs and multi-projector Powerwalls
Clustering CAVE w. partner TechViz for cluster envrionments (since 2015x)

The first three modes are a native feature of our improved render engine. As a result, you are not required to use a specific VR app for an immersive experience of your data. You can activate your HTC Vive (or any other supported VR system) directly in a supported 3D app (mostly CATIA apps at the moment).

You can access the VR commands directly from the View section of supported apps. If you already have SteamVR installed and your Vive calibrated, no further preparation steps are required. Please note: Immersive Wall and the CAVE command require an xml configuration file. The 3DEXPERIENCE manual explains how these configs need to be created.

Workflows

The integration with various apps eliminates any data conversion efforts and allows for a quick & easy design evaluation at the personal workplace. Any design changes can be experienced in 1:1 scale in an immersive way at the push of a button, allowing for fast design iterations.

Due to the integration with various apps, you are not limited to just exploring you data in Virtual Reality. You can do a local collaborative session with a colleague, one of you operating the app while the other person is wearing the HMD and can provide immediate feedback.

Since 3DEXPERIENCE R2017x Hotfix4 we also offer two different HMD scenarios:

1) Designer ambience: brings whatever you see in your app's viewer directly to VR.

2) Natural ambience: automatically positions your product in an optimized VR design review environment. The correct environment is determined by the size of your product. Each environment contains some known references, such as chairs, doors, etc. in order to provide a better sense of scale. Furthermore, the environments are designed to be non-intrusive but highly realistic to create a strong sense of immersion or presence.

Note: the Showroom environment in Hotfix4 is affected by a distortion bug. It will be fixed in an upcoming hotfix.

Packaging

All four VR modes are part of the role Immersive Visual Experience in 3DEXPERIENCE 2017x. However, even if you do not have that role yet, you can use the trial mode to test it anyway. Trial mode is feature complete but adds a watermark to the VR viewer.

So please feel free to test if you already have an HTC Vive and post you questions, comments and any kind of feedback you might have.

Prerequisites

VR in general, but HMD rendering in particular has very high performance requirements. Thus we recommend to use at least an NVIDIA M6000 GPU or better for the best experience.

If you are working on very complex data, you might consider to prepare all or only parts of your data with the app CATIA Experience Models Preparation to improve render performance. Make sure to activate Asynchronous Reprojection in your SteamVR Performance Settings. You can do further performance tuning with the Visual Quality command (available in the View section of the Action Bar).