Varjo Introduces ‘Teleport’ Service for Seamless Real-World Scanning into VR

Varjo, a leader in the realm of high-end XR headsets, has just unveiled an innovative 3D scanning service designed for enterprises. This new service, telegraphed through their app Teleport, is crafted to transform offline environments into immersive digital spaces rapidly and is accessible both in Virtual Reality and on traditional displays.

Teleport is a subscription-based application that lets users swiftly capture and replicate real-world settings, doing so in a mere 5–10 minutes. This is a significant time-saver compared to the older photogrammetry techniques. The app runs smoothly on various capture devices, particularly iPhones and iPads equipped with iOS 17 or newer. This compatibility spans a wide range of Apple devices, from the iPhone XR upwards, to the 8th generation iPad and beyond.

Once you’ve crafted these “digital twins,” they can be easily accessed on devices like phones and PCs or through Varjo’s XR headsets, alongside other prominent PC VR headsets. Teleport’s impressive 3D models are processed in the cloud, leveraging the capabilities of Gaussian Splatting and NVIDIA’s advanced GPU-trained generative models. Interestingly, you’ll only need an internet connection for the initial download since the exploration of the model happens locally on the device.

Varjo has set the price for Teleport at $30 per month, but they’re currently offering a a tempting seven-day free trial. Users who sign up can explore an array of captured environments in various levels of definition—ranging from standard to high-definition—via a web viewer or through a desktop client for the highest quality models.

This unveiling of Teleport aligns with Varjo’s expanded Series D funding wave, which has welcomed new investors such as Beyond Capital, Nishikawa Communications, and NVIDIA. While the exact figures of this latest investment remain under wraps, Varjo revealed to Road to VR that their total funding has now reached around €180 million, or about $188 million USD.

According to Varjo, this funding injection will bolster their efforts to quicken the uptake of their XR hardware and software solutions in industry, as shared by their CEO, Timo Toikkanen. He emphasized that Varjo is on a mission to harness AI and machine learning to seamlessly merge real and virtual realms, aiming to boost productivity and efficiency for their industrial clientele.

In the meantime, Meta is gearing up with its consumer-oriented project, Horizon Hyperscape, revealed back in September. This demo serves to illustrate Meta’s ambitions for ultra-realistic digital spaces. Eventually, Meta promises that creators will have the ability to “build worlds within Horizon by using a phone to scan a room and then recreate it,” though a definitive launch date remains under wraps.