Beijing time on October 31st, Nvidia invested 372 million US dollars to build a new headquarters in Santa Clara, in the design process, it uses VR technology. Before the end of next year, employees will move into the new headquarters. Recently, Venturebeat reporter visited the new headquarters, the new headquarters has not yet been completed, but the design behind the story let us see the charm of VR.

Nvidia's new headquarters is located in Santa Clara, California, and it is shaped like a triangle. In 3D graphics, a triangle is a basic polygon building block. As an independent company, Nvidia is the world's largest manufacturer of 3D graphics chips.

The new headquarters invested US$372 million. It reflects a trend: In Silicon Valley, many successful companies are building new buildings. Their designs reflect their unique personality in order to attract outstanding talents and encourage employees to cooperate. Sometimes, the project expresses the company's vision perfectly, sometimes more like an image project, and deviates from the track. During the construction of Nvidia's headquarters, in order to simulate the new building, its graphics chip, VR tools, and visual software helped a lot. In a VR environment, Nvidia and corporate architects can see the effect of the building and then make changes to determine the final design.

Iray showcases the internal structure of the new headquarters

The building occupies 500,000 square feet. The new headquarters will be officially completed in the fall of 2017 and can accommodate more than 2,200 employees. I have had conversations with Gensler architects and Nvidia real estate executives and they have been implementing new headquarters projects for more than four years. I also visited Nvidia's VR office to see how they used VR technology. Nvidia uses professional rendering software Iray to make 3D graphics.

When it comes to real buildings, it is a bit impressive: The roof is made up of various forms of triangles. Although the entire parcel has reached 25 acres, there is no outdoor parking. Nvidia built a 2-story underground garage that can accommodate more than 1,500 cars. When employees drive the car into the garage, they can enter the stairs and use the elevator to directly enter the center of the building.

New headquarters under construction

“The triangle represents our identity.” John O'Brien, senior director of real estate at Nvdia (John O'Brien), said at the press conference, “We are a visual computing company and the triangle is the basic building block of rendering. When our CEO When Huang Renxun saw the triangle, he said: 'It is it.'"

The project began in 2007 when Nvidia purchased 25 acres of land in Santa Clara and a nearby 10-acre plot. Soon the company began to design the building and it wanted to move out of the leased building early. In 2008 and 2009, Huang Renxun shelved the project and the company continued to rent the office building. The project was restarted four years ago.

At that time, Huang Renxun told the team: Re-examine the entire design. He hopes that the design of the new headquarters will be more consistent with Nvidia's business, and he hopes that the building can encourage employees to collaborate.

Triangular skylight

Now, Nvidia has placed thousands of employees in Silicon Valley, scattered offices in 12 buildings, and collaboration between different departments is quite difficult. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have released a report confirming that if employees work in the same building and on the same floor, individual employees have a 95% chance to go to another department to contact someone; if they are on different floors, only 5% Opportunity; if you are in a different building, this opportunity is close to 0%.

“The staff are housed in 12 buildings. If someone wants to stimulate innovation across departments, it is very difficult to accidentally hit such people.” O'Brien said, “Let art and science merge, our business is related to this and we need cooperation."

Photographing buildings with drones

Nvidia knows Pixar's headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., that the center of the Pixar building is open, allowing employees to gather and there are bathrooms and other facilities. They also know that Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs likes the design of a circular “spacecraft”. However, Huang Renxun thinks that circle doesn't help much in collaboration. Triangles are better.

After the project was launched again, Nvidia formed a new team with Gensler employees, employees of the general contractor Devcon Construction and landscape architect Tom Leader Studio, and employees of the development consultancy Sares-Regis Group. They work in a two-story building. The floors are connected by stairs and other facilities. They can see each other. Manan Shah, head of Gensler Studios, said: "This building is the basis for the design of Nvidia's new headquarters."

Everywhere is a staircase

With Iray, the system can track light, know exactly how reflective the material is, and know what the architectural design looks like in the real world. Scott DeWoody, creative media manager at Gensler, said that during the planning phase VR simulation technology came in handy because it can more accurately represent the design.

From the very beginning, Iray was not very practical. Huang Renxun asked the team to develop a better system to improve light and shadow processing capabilities. With this set of software, architects can see the exact image of the final building. During the construction process, it is sometimes necessary to make adjustments to the design and the architect can modify it in the software.

The ceiling is covered with skylights

Phillip Miller, senior director of product management at Iray, said: “You can get a sense of presence. It exposes all the shortcomings. In different camera angles, the shortcomings may be obscured and undetectable. You can find some You can't find anything that you couldn't have found. You can find errors in the VR model."

According to the modification plan provided by the architect, De Woody can quickly create new renderings, which can basically be completed in real time. Put in the past, it usually takes a day or longer to be modified. As a result, the entire design work is much faster and the effect is much better. In order to achieve the goal, Nvidia puts the graphics processing unit in the cloud, and the cloud installs 120 graphics chips that can render the same image. De Woody can access Iray software anywhere in the world.

Front view

For example, during the walkthrough process, the team found that there were too many triangular windows installed in the entire building. Triangular skylights create excessive glare and shine on computer monitors. Shaha said that in order to solve this problem, the architect reduced the number of sunroofs, saving money and reducing glare. Shaha said that with the help of VR tools, they can determine how much sunlight is suitable.

After parking from the garage, employees come directly to the center of the building. Here, employees can meet each other and they can go straight up the stairs or go to their desks.

“Employees enter the building from the center, and the central area is also a social area.” O'Brien said, “There are meeting rooms, meeting places, and bathrooms. On the side of the building, there is more quietness and people can be more focused. Concentrate on doing things. Even if you are introverted and you just want to concentrate on your work, you have to go to the center of the building. The central area forces you to meet people. This is the beginning of design."

The building is still under construction

O'Brien also said that with VR, a better sense of scale will be obtained when viewing from any given area, and the view will be better. For example, you can know if the view is blocked by a cylinder. Some companies sell animation products such as Siemens, which use Iray as a rendering engine. Now, the Nvidia Berlin team has developed independent Iray software that anyone can use. It can directly embed animation software such as 3D Studio Max. Miller said that Iray software can accurately simulate the physical properties of more than 1,000 materials. Iray has been in commercial use for nearly 9 months now.

“Huang Renren hopes Iray can be used to simulate buildings, just as Nvidia will model the design before making chips.” O'Brien said, “Iray is still in its infancy. As it becomes more mature, we will use it as a model. Iterative design tools. Many buildings are built every day, but they haven't been simulated."

In addition, during the construction of the building, Nvidia continued to track the entire construction process. It lets the drone pass through the building area and captures the image as long as it changes slightly. Nvidia showed me an animated view of the building area. The image was constructed using the data captured by the data points. The software connects the data into a "point cloud" map with 12 billion points.

Completed in the fall of 2017

In VR, I can watch from any angle, let the images advance in timeline, appreciate how the building is built step by step, and even concrete and materials can be seen. This is a stop motion animation that records everything that happens in the building. To demonstrate this, Nvidia invokes a powerful GPU processing capability.

Miller said: "VR helps us turn images into real-time information. We can now log in and look at objects, such as trucks. At some point in the future, based on the images you see in the 'point cloud' image, You can see how 80% of the buildings are completed."

At the end of 2017, Nvidia employees will move into the new building. In Santa Clara’s existing building, Nvidia employs more than 4,000 people and the new headquarters cannot accommodate all employees. However, Nvidia has plenty of land to continue building new buildings in the future. (Compiling / Tiger Tao)

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