John Markoff: Using virtual reality for corporate HQ

Demonstration of virtual reality has been an integral part of chip maker Nvidia's design and construction of its new building powered by its products

In the heart of Silicon Valley, you can slip on a virtual reality headset and fly through a photo-realistic three-dimensional building that will soon be the new corporate home for the chip maker Nvidia.

The building is still under construction, visible today as a large white frame with an undulating roof that is evocative of both an airplane wing and a circus tent. Scheduled to open in late 2017, the $380-million project will house 2,500 employees. A second building is also on the drawing board.

The virtual reality demonstration has been integral to Nvidia's design and construction of the new building - it is powered by Nvidia products. Nvidia makes computing chips that were originally used to accelerate computer graphics in video games. Today, the chips are increasingly being used in engineering visualisation and high-performance computing, including the architectural design of the company's future headquarters.

This year, Nvidia also began offering a highly interactive rendering software technology intended to complement its graphical processors. Known as Iray, the software has made it possible to quickly alter everything in the company's architectural design simulation, from the location, size and transparency of triangle-shaped skylights to material surfaces and colours.

"We have never been able to capture the fidelity we are able to reach today," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia. "The rug has to be precisely like the rug in the real world and the paint has to be the paint."

Nvidia harnessed its graphics chips and rendering software to help create its new headquarters largely because of Mr. Huang, who established Nvidia in 1993 and has built it into a company with $5 billion in annual revenue. He began with a vision for the new structure where thousands of employees could collaborate under the canopy of a sky-high tree, with the light filtering through onto their work spaces.

Mr. Huang hired the design firm Gensler for the project, working with the architect Hao Ko to capture Nvidia's culture of being open, collaborative and flexible in the building design.

To make real the notion of light filtering from above, they began with a scattered array of triangle-shaped skylights. The triangle is emblematic of the basic graphical component of modern software rendering systems that create 3-D graphical images that the Nvidia hardware generates.

Other architectural elements soon fell into place: The building would be surrounded by a park, and parking would be hidden in an underground garage. To foster collaboration, the designers also effectively created a choke point in the building - people entering from the underground parking structure will emerge onto a broad central staircase.

The headquarters are also reconfigurable, based largely around Wi-Fi, not cables. Walls are largely movable. And in a nod to Nvidia's flat corporate hierarchy, there will be no discernible executive suite.

Nvidia's technology soon began to help with the process. The company used more than 100 of its graphical processors to create what Mr. Huang described as the "world's largest simulator of photons".

"We simulated every light beam for every hour of the day for every day of the year," he said.

As a result, software made it possible to find hot spots in the new building. That enabled the designers to move people away from the heat and yet maintain a warm work setting.

With virtual reality headsets becoming available this year through makers like HTC, Nvidia decided to use the tools for its construction project. The headsets have made it possible for the architects from Gensler to see things that would not easily have been visible in a 2-D model. For example, they discovered a visual obstruction at the top of the entry staircase that would have been tough to detect before the building was actually constructed.

The Iray software has also discouraged the designers from creating a large skylight at the building's centre. Viewed in a 3-D simulation, it was easy to see that it would flood the building with too much light.

"We used our computational power and our technology to model the inside of the building," said Debora Shoquist, Nvidia's executive vice-president for operations. "Iray allows you to model how the light comes in and how it reflects. Reflection, refraction, absorption - it's just math."

In one sense, the new design tools are the realisation of the original Sketchpad, an interactive computing drafting system first envisioned by the computer scientist Ivan Sutherland in his doctoral thesis in 1963. In 1968, as a professor at Harvard, Mr. Sutherland followed that with a pioneering virtual and augmented reality simulator called a head-mounted display.

Four decades later, this form of interactive visual design is likely to rapidly become a standard tool for architects.

"I was pretty much like a kid in the candy store when they first gave me access to a cluster of processors running Iray," said Scott DeWoody, a visualisation artist for Gensler who has worked on the project. "I stayed up until three in the morning."

© 2016 The New York Times News Service