Imagine walking through the bustling streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus, when suddenly you’re in a tropical rainforest, surrounded by vibrant flowers and dancing butterflies.
That’s what audiences will see in the virtual world of The Green Planet AR Experience, an interactive, augmented reality experience that blends physical and digital worlds to connect people with nature.
During the Green Planet AR Experience, powered by EE 5G, visitors are led through a living rainforest and six distinct biomes by a 3D hologram of Sir David Attenborough, familiar to many as the narrator of some of the world’s most-watched nature documentaries.
Audiences engage and interact with the plant life by using a mobile device, which acts as a window into the natural world.
To bring these virtual worlds to life in a sustainable way, award-winning studio Factory 42 combined captivating storytelling with cutting-edge technology. Using NVIDIA RTX and CloudXR, the creative team elevated the AR experience and delivered high-fidelity, photorealistic virtual environments over a 5G network.
Natural, Immersive AR Over 5G — It’s a Stream Come True
The Green Planet AR Experience’s mission is to inspire, educate and motivate visitors toward positive change by showcasing how plants are vital to all life on earth. Through the project, Factory 42 and the BBC help audiences gain a deeper understanding of ecosystems, the importance of biodiversity and what it means to protect our planet.
To create an immersive environment that captured the rich, vivid colors and details of natural worlds, the Factory 42 team needed high-quality imagery and graphics power. Using mobile edge computing allowed them to deliver the interactive experience to a large number of users over EE’s private 5G network.
The AR experience runs on a custom, on-premises GPU edge-rendering stack powered by NVIDIA RTX 8000 professional GPUs. Using NVIDIA RTX, Factory 42 created ultra-high-quality 3D digital assets, environments, interactions and visual effects that made the natural elements look as realistic as possible.
With the help of U.K.-based integrator The GRID Factory, the GPU edge-rendering stack is connected to EE’s private 5G network using the latest Ericsson Industry Connect solution for a dedicated wireless cellular network. Using NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation (RTX vWS) on VMware Horizon, and NVIDIA’s advanced CloudXR streaming solution, Factory 42 can stream all the content from the edge of the private 5G network to the Samsung S21 mobile handsets used by each visitor.
“NVIDIA RTX vWS and CloudXR were a step ahead of the competitive products — their robustness, ability to fractionalize the GPU, and high-quality delivery of streamed XR content were key features that allowed us to create our Green Planet AR Experience as a group experience to thousands of users,” said Stephen Stewart, CTO at Factory 42.
The creative team at Factory 42 designed the content in the AR environment, which is rendered in real time with the Unity game engine. The 3D hologram of Sir David was created using volumetric capture technology provided by Dimension Studios. Spatial audio provides a surround-sound setup, which guides people through the virtual environment as digital plants and animals react to the presence of visitors in the space.
Combining these technologies, Factory42 created a new level of immersive experience — one only made possible through 5G networks.
“NVIDIA RTX and CloudXR are fundamental to our ability to deliver this 5G mobile edge compute experience,” said Stewart. “The RTX 8000 GPU provided the graphics power and the NVENC support required to deploy into an edge rendering cluster. And with CloudXR, we could create robust connections to mobile handsets.”
Sustainability was considered at every level of construction and operation. The materials used in building The Green Planet AR Experience will be reused or recycled after the event to promote circularity. And combining NVIDIA RTX and CloudXR with 5G, Factory 42 can give audiences interactive experiences with hundreds of different trees, plants and creatures inside an eco-friendly, virtual space.
Experience the Future of Streaming at GTC
Learn more about how NVIDIA is helping companies create unforgettable immersive experiences at GTC, which runs from March 21-24.
Registration is free. Sign up to hear from leading companies and professionals across industries, including Factory 42, as they share insights about the future of AR, VR and other extended reality applications.
And watch the keynote address by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, on March 22 at 8 a.m. Pacific, to hear the latest news on NVIDIA technologies.
