Yesterday Autodesk completed the acquisition of PI-VR a privately held German software company that specializes in sophisticated real time visualization technology used primarily in the automotive industry.
Some people may have seen this, but apart from joining the bandwagon I wanted to reiterate this announcement and also add some more background, as to what this may offer and what we can hopefully look forward to in the future.
PI-VR primarily offer an application called VRED, which is available in a few different flavours.
Having played around with VRED Pro a couple of years back it’s great to see this solution become part of the Autodesk portfolio.
Similar to Autodesk Showcase, you can make use of HDR environments for real time visualisation and also like Autodesk Showcase Pro 2013 R1 you can link to HDR Light Studio for greater flexibility when wishing to use custom real time environments.
But in addition, depending on the flavour (VRED Essentials, VRED Photo and VRED Professional) you have further levels of benefit from camera control with post processing options, creation of variants, surface analysis, annotation, comprehensive material libraries, real time ray tracing and refraction, animation, and then because of it's greater utilisation of workstation hardware, native support for stereo displays, cave installations, clustering, multi touch and even head tracking support.
