On Monday we mentioned that both AMD and Nvidia were at the weekend's VRLA expo, showing off their latest hardware, software and accessories and demonstrating the state-of-the-art of VR. The LA-based event is the biggest event of its kind and it was sponsored in AMD, so it got to open the show with a keynote, provided by Roy Taylor, Corporate Vice President of Alliances. A few hours ago the VRLA organisation published Mr Taylor's keynote in full on YouTube.
So many of AMD's plans and prospects were covered in this 23 minute presentation that I think it is very much worthy of summarising, at least as a recap of where AMD is at the current time in the current market and where it aims to be.
Roy Taylor began by telling the crowd that "VR is everything", not just for games and entertainment - it will be useful, and widely used for manufacturing, design, military, training, retail and more. With the adoption of VR a global service industry will rise up to provide VRaaS (VR as a service), providing professional VR imagery and sound capture (or creation) for industry. Taylor went on to introduce the significant personnel in the AMD VR Team and provided brief snippets about their experience and responsibilities going forward.
AMD drivers were brought up jokily by Taylor. He said people had told him "We really like you - but you've got to do something about those drivers". Then we got a recap on the progress of the Crimson drivers and were told that AMD was also working very closely with "every major software package that you use to create". See above.
Taylor also talked about a couple of VR software projects. We heard about 'The Lonely Whale' and a VR version of that old Atari classic BattleZone which will implement Liquid VR and DX12 tech. An interesting way that AMD will be expanding VR will be via 'Gaze activated content' which presents interactive VR within seemingly regular VR video experiences.
The development of Polaris GPUs was touched upon next. Taylor drove home the benefits of Polaris on 14nm to the crowd saying "we can now produce GPUs, which will run the minimum spec for VR, at a lower cost, in larger volume, consuming less power, and running faster." He reminded us that in the second half of 2016 this tech will be available for us to make VR a more accessible possibility.
Other things talked about in the presentation were the Tiki PC powered by dual-Fiji, as mentioned in the previous article (and pictured above). At one point we seemed to jump off at a tangent, as a guest came on stage to introduce a new computing platform called the 'Envelop Virtual Environment'. This is headlined as the "first fully immersive computing platform" providing infinite monitors and infinite desktop space.
The conclusion to the presentation was that VR is brimming with possibilities, and AMD is the best choice to power it, but there is yet to be a 'Sonic the Hedgehog' killer app - so Taylor told developers to be daring and different to make some waves and hopefully create that killer app with a mix of perspiration and inspiration.
