What is VR-NEXT®?

VR-NEXT® is a new rendering engine and provides more improved graphics and performance for the FORUM8's VR applications and simulation applications. These are provided by the modern OpenGL (OpenGL 4.3) and PBR technology which is a new method for the rendering of 3D models having realistic and physical features such as material and lighting. Using physical characteristics helps to define materials and to render images jnmmzwith more reality. Defining materials physically allows you to get information on color and light reflection, and model shape can be reproduced with less polygon. In addition, you can also render images with more reality while keeping the rendering performance including speed and memory usage high.

Improvement of Shader

FORUM8 started to develop VR-NEXT® when Khronos, a consortium aiming at creating the standards for OpenGL, published the standard for PBR rendering. Since then, the standard has been revised several times due to the addition of rules for new effects and material parameters, and VR-NEXT® has also been revised based on that. As a major feature of the future version of VR-NEXT®, we will surely improve the operationability with other software by using the reference shader for the most part of the product.

For more information, here are the new parameters that would be available in the next release of VR-NEXT®.

1. Clear coat (Khronos extension KHR_materials_clearcoat):
   Precisely renders thin, glossy layers. Great for car rendering.
2. Transmission (Khronos extension KHR_materials_transimission):
   Transparent surfaces such as glass and water can be rendered. Original PRB parameters can also be rendered at the same time, which allows the accurate rendering of frosted glass, metal-coated glass, etc.
3. Scene (Khronos extension KHR_materials_sheen):
   Simulating the microfiber renders the fabric texture precisely.

Khronos has published the release notes for these new material parameters as well as an example below.

In accordance with the continuous improvement of PBR technology (and the standardization by Khronos), we will continue to update the rendering function of VR-NEXT®. A possible major point to be improved is the support of volume rendering, which will enable the rendering of material thickness.

JavaScript Support

We are planning to provide an SDK to allow the fine-tuning of various real-time simulations as well as adding new functions of VR-NEXT® easily. Since JavaScript has been a very popular programming language in recent years, we think it is the best programming language for VR-NEXT®.

To use JavaScript has several advantages; not only that you can develop extensions that can provide additional important functionalities to users but also you can create simple scripts faster.

In addition, since we can get a lot of free open source JavaScript libraries, we can reduce a lot of actual programming implementation works, which leads to both FORUM8 and customers getting new functions instantly at low cost.