ColourCloud to harness Intel Skylake processing power for 3D depth and image data

March 10, 2017 -- NCTech, the developer of reality imaging systems, today announced that its ColourCloud® software is being hosted on Google Cloud Platform.

At the Google Cloud Next ’17 conference, Intel announced that the next generation Intel® Xeon® processor family (codename Skylake),is now available on Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform is the first to offer cloud services based on Skylake. The Intel Xeon processor supports Intel AVX-512 instructions to more efficiently run compute-intensive workloads, such as high-performance computing, video processing and data analytics.

This development provides powerful support for the capture and processing of 3D imaging. With ColourCloud now hosted on Google Cloud Platform, NCTech is able to provide a secure, end-to-end capture, process, and delivery workflow for its customers.

“With the upcoming launch of our new range of VR cameras we’ve migrated our 3D visualizing software ColourCloud to Google Cloud Platform, said Neil Tocher, CTO at NCTech. “This allows us to leverage Google Compute Engine to process vast amounts of high-resolution depth and image data, making VR capture and delivery a speedy process for professionals and consumers.”

Jonathan Ballon, VP of IoT at Intel said, "We are thrilled that NCTech has adopted Intel with Google Cloud as the foundation to launch their new VR and IoT solutions, including 3D cameras for Google StreetView. The Intel - Google Cloud strategic alliance has enabled NCTech to quickly leverage vast compute power to democratize VR with their new range of edge-to-cloud camera hardware and services”.

NCTech will launch two new VR cameras in 2017:

The LASiris VR is a 3D reality capture camera that combines vivid 120 Megapixel HDR imagery with a 100-meter range LiDAR scanner. The data from the calibrated optics and lasers is combined using NCTech’s built-in ColourCloud® technology to produce a colourised point cloud.

The iris360 Pro is the latest version of the iris360 product line and is NCTech’s highest resolution one-shot system to date, using precision optics to capture 10 bit true HDR images.

In support of its new VR cameras, NCTech will also launch a new cloud-based platform for backing-up, processing, and sharing VR data. OnestopVR harnesses the pure processing power of Google Compute Engine’s exceptional infrastructure capabilities, combined with Intel’s advanced hardware. Using OnestopVR, point cloud data and images uploaded to the cloud are automatically mapped precisely to the depth data, delivering automatically colourised point clouds.

Google Cloud Next ’17 is an immersive event that brings together executives, customers, partners, developers, IT decision makers, and Google Engineers to build the future of the cloud.