Today at Mixed Reality Dev Days, we are excited to announce the public preview of point cloud file support in Azure Remote Rendering! Remote Rendering enables developers to render high-quality interactive 3D content and stream it to devices like HoloLens 2 in real time. Today, Remote Rendering is great for rendering detailed meshes from FBX and GLTF/GLB files. In the past you would need to convert to these formats to use your models with the service. Now with point cloud file support, you can take raw data from your favorite lidar scanner and visualize places and spaces quickly and easily. We have added this feature in a way that does not change how you use the service. Point cloud capabilities have been one of the top asks from our partners and developers, so we are excited to bring this to public preview today! We have also made numerous updates to the service to improve performance and usability.
Microsoft logo and sign at Redmond campus rendered using point cloud .E57 file
Getting started is simple. To try out the latest release, please find and follow our quick start guide here: https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/remote-rendering/ If you already use Remote Rendering, you can upload your .e57, .ply, and .xyz file types to your Azure storage, and use them in the same way that you work with FBX, or GLTF/GLB files today.
Remote Rendering now has support for. e57, .ply, and .xyz point cloud file types:
-We now support conversion from these native point cloud file types, directly to the .arrAsset file needed to render on Azure. This provides a clean and simple way to take raw data from your favorite lidar scanners and quickly get it up and running with Remote Rendering.
-Premium Remote Rendering can support point cloud files with up to 2.5 billion points! This enables leveraging some of the largest/highest resolution scans for your use cases.
Customers are using point clouds to re-visit cultural heritage sites, conduct construction site design reviews, floor planning, solving layouts for large spaces, quality control, and more. We have gotten great feedback from our partners and are excited to see how you leverage this new feature.
Additionally, since it became generally available last year, we have been busy updating the service. Here are key updates:
- Dramatically reduced the start time for Standard Remote Rendering sessions.
- Most Standard sessions begin in < 10 seconds.
- Improved hologram stability, by implementing a local pose mode.
- Results in much better quality when combining local and remote holograms.
- OpenXR support.
- Supporting this industry standard makes Remote Rendering compatible with a broadly accepted API.
For more information, please visit our documentation here: Azure Remote Rendering documentation - Azure Remote Rendering | Microsoft Docs . We would love to get your feedback on the service. Let us know in the comments below how you are using Remote Rendering or enter your feedback at aka.ms/ARRFeedback and let us know what you want in future releases!