NVIDIA Holodeck

Not to be confused with Holodeck.

NVIDIA Holodeck
Information
Type	VR collaboration platform
Industry	Industrial design, architecture, engineering and construction
Developer	NVIDIA
Operating System	Windows
Supported Devices	HTC Vive, Oculus Rift
Release Date	May 2017 (announced as Project Holodeck); October 10, 2017 (early access)

NVIDIA Holodeck is a collaborative virtual reality design environment developed by NVIDIA. It was designed to let several people, each in a VR headset and possibly in different locations, review the same full-resolution 3D model together in a photorealistic, physically simulated space. NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang first showed it as "Project Holodeck" at the company's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose in May 2017, with a design review of a Koenigsegg Regera hypercar, and opened an early access program at GTC Europe in Munich on October 10, 2017.

Holodeck was built on an enhanced version of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4 combined with NVIDIA's GameWorks, VRWorks and DesignWorks technologies. NVIDIA offered early access to designers, developers and inventors, and presented Holodeck as a test environment for AI agents, including robots trained with its Isaac simulation software. Holodeck was named after the Holodeck of Star Trek. Later trade coverage describes it as the VR-focused precursor of NVIDIA's broader Omniverse collaboration platform.

Reviewed 21 October 2026. Checked every dated claim, quote, spec and attribution against the cited Road to VR, UploadVR, CGW, NVIDIA, Tom's Hardware, Computerworld, Techgage, AWN, TechCrunch, Architosh, AEC Magazine and Cadalyst sources, plus the current NVIDIA XR page and the old Holodeck URL redirect. About review dates.

History

Project Holodeck at GTC 2017

Huang opened his GTC 2017 keynote with a live demonstration of Project Holodeck built around a detailed CAD model from the Swedish carmaker Koenigsegg. Company founder Christian von Koenigsegg joined the session from Sweden in a VR headset and, with a few of his employees, gave a virtual tour of the Regera. The participants appeared as humanoid robot avatars whose movements followed their headsets and controllers. Their virtual hands rested on the steering wheel and ran along the dashboard without passing through them, and the car was cut away to show a detailed chassis based on Koenigsegg's real CAD data and then "exploded" into thousands of component parts. NVIDIA's announcement described the car as a US$1.9 million supercar and said the model had 50 million polygons, which Holodeck rendered without geometric simplification. It also said Holodeck could simulate lighting for scenarios such as day and night driving, road conditions and weather. A Make magazine report from the keynote noted technical problems at the start of the presentation and an x-ray view that showed the car's engine and computer systems.

UploadVR described Project Holodeck as a social VR space that, unlike low-polygon social apps such as AltspaceVR and Facebook Spaces, put photorealistic graphics and believable physics first. It reported that NVIDIA planned early access for September 2017. At that stage NVIDIA described three pillars for the project: photorealistic models, interactive physics and collaboration.

Isaac robot demonstration at SIGGRAPH 2017

At SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles, NVIDIA gave what it called the first interactive demonstration of a robot trained in its Isaac Lab simulator. Visitors could play dominoes against the robot on the show floor or enter the same game in VR through Project Holodeck. Two neural networks ran the robot: one classified camera images to read the state of the board and the legal moves, and a second, trained with reinforcement learning, chose which tile to play and where to place it. NVIDIA also gave the first hands-on demonstration of the Koenigsegg Regera model at the show, where attendees could change its color, use a clipping sphere to look at hidden parts, and explode the model into its assemblies while talking with participants in other rooms.

In a Voices of VR podcast interview recorded at SIGGRAPH 2017, Omer Shapira, NVIDIA's senior VR designer on the project, said the team used Unreal Engine to simulate interactions with people in VR, and that the same code base of deep reinforcement learning algorithms was then used to drive a physical Baxter robot.

Early access (October 2017)

The early access program opened later than first planned. Huang announced it at GTC Europe in Munich on October 10, 2017, calling Holodeck a "design lab of the future" and naming four pillars: photorealistic models, physics and haptics simulation, team collaboration, and GPU-accelerated AI. In the keynote a similar demonstration used a virtual McLaren 720S, with collaborators in different locations shown as avatars in one space. NVIDIA said early access was limited to a select group of designers, developers and inventors, and that later updates would add AI-based training, simulation and content creation. Bob Pette, NVIDIA's vice president of Professional Visualization, called it "an unparalleled environment for deploying and testing AI-based agents". The release also quoted early testers from the architecture firms Gensler and KPF and from NASA's Hybrid Reality Lab.

Applicants had to work in Maya or 3ds Max, the two formats the first early access build could import; Road to VR reported that a plugin architecture was meant to add most industry-standard CAD formats later. Computerworld reported that testers needed a VR computer with at least a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Quadro P6000 or TITAN Xp graphics card, and Techgage listed the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive as supported headsets. Computerworld added that NVIDIA was preparing a commercial version.

2018 demonstrations and AEC tools

At GTC in March 2018, NVIDIA used Holodeck in a remote driving demonstration. A driver on stage wore an HTC Vive and sat in a cockpit rig with a steering wheel; Holodeck loaded a virtual car, the Lexus used in the film Black Panther, and a live video feed then let him drive an empty Ford Fusion slowly around a private lot behind the convention center. TechCrunch described the demonstration as a proof of concept, with no platforms or availability announced.

A month later, Architosh reported from a GTC architecture panel that Holodeck was still in early access, that companies had to apply for the beta period, and that the architecture firm CannonDesign moved models from Revit through other tools and 3ds Max into Holodeck. In August 2018, ahead of SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, NVIDIA announced new tools for architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) users, and said CannonDesign used Holodeck to place designers and clients inside a building model at 1:1 scale.

Features

Area	Capability	Source
Rendering	Photorealistic real-time rendering of large models at life-size scale; the Koenigsegg Regera model had 50 million polygons and was shown without geometric simplification
Physics	Physically simulated objects, so virtual hands are stopped by a steering wheel instead of passing through it; NVIDIA PhysX for physics simulation
Collaboration	Multiple users in different locations share one virtual space as avatars and can talk to each other
Model review	Exploded views, a clipping sphere for hidden parts, color changes and lighting simulation
Holotable (2018)	Scale models on a tabletop podium that can be rotated and sectioned, with layer toggles for exploring floor plans and adjustable lighting
Import (2018)	Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Visualize models (requiring the 2019 beta) and larger AEC models, in addition to 3ds Max and Maya
Navigation (2018)	Teleporting between floors and elevations; beacons marking points of interest in multi-level models
Design tools (2018)	Whiteboard, drawing and measurement tools; video and 360-degree image capture; a built-in web browser for reference images, videos and Google Hangouts; passcode-protected private sessions; editable material library
AI and robotics	Test environment for AI agents and robots trained with NVIDIA's Isaac simulator

Relationship to Omniverse

NVIDIA later built a broader collaboration platform, NVIDIA Omniverse, on Pixar's Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD). In a 2020 AEC Magazine article, Greg Corke wrote that Holodeck "was very focused on VR, but laid the foundations for a new, much broader, collaboration platform called Omniverse". NVIDIA's Richard Kerris told the magazine that the team had looked at "what was working and was not working with Holodeck" and decided that standardizing around USD would allow the same approach through an open standard. Cadalyst wrote in 2021 that the origin of Omniverse "can be traced back to internal tools that were first exposed externally back at GTC '17 in Project Holodeck", and that Holodeck's collaboration features had been overshadowed by its emphasis on VR. When Huang announced the Omniverse open beta on October 5, 2020, he called it "the beginning of the Star Trek Holodeck, realized at last."

As of October 2026, the address of NVIDIA's former UK Holodeck page redirects to the company's extended reality solutions page, which lists CloudXR, VRWorks, VR Ready, Omniverse and Virtual Reality Capture and Replay, and does not mention Holodeck.

See also

• NVIDIA Omniverse
• NVIDIA VRWorks
• Enterprise VR
• Social VR
• Holodeck