Varjo Unveils ‘Teleport’ Service for Effortless Real-to-VR Scanning

Varjo, renowned for its premium XR headsets, has just unveiled an exciting addition: a smartphone-based 3D scanning service. This innovation is geared towards enterprise users, paving the way for rapid creation of photorealistic environments that can be explored both in virtual reality and on regular screens.

The app, known as Teleport, simplifies the process of capturing and recreating real-world spaces. The Finnish company claims this can be done in a swift 5 to 10 minutes—remarkably quicker than traditional photogrammetry methods. It supports devices like iPhones and iPads operating iOS 17 or later, covering a wide range of models from the iPhone XR upwards, along with the 8th gen iPad and newer.

Once created, these “digital twins” are accessible on smartphones and PCs, and can be explored using Varjo’s XR headsets or other leading PC VR headsets. Thanks to advancements in Gaussian Splatting and generative models trained with NVIDIA GPUs, Teleport’s 3D models are processed in the cloud before being rendered directly on your device. This setup means you’ll only need an internet connection for the initial model download, allowing you to explore at your convenience without staying online.

Teleport is priced at $30 per month, but Varjo is currently offering a seven-day free trial. By signing up, users gain the ability to browse a variety of captures in both standard and high-definition through its web viewer, or in the highest quality via a desktop client.

This release of Teleport coincides with an expansion of Varjo’s Series D funding round. New investors like Beyond Capital, Nishikawa Communications, and NVIDIA have come onboard. While Varjo hasn’t specified the recent funding amount, they’ve shared with Road to VR that this boost raises their lifetime funding to about €180 million (approximately $188 million USD).

The fresh funding is set to bolster Varjo’s mission to quicken the adoption of their XR hardware and software for industrial uses. CEO Timo Toikkanen highlights that Varjo aims to harness AI and machine learning to integrate real and virtual realms, thus boosting productivity and efficiency for their industrial clientele.

In a related development, Meta is crafting a similar product for consumers, announced in September as Horizon Hyperscape. This demo is intended to illustrate Meta’s strides toward photorealism. Meta indicates that eventually, creators will be able to “build worlds within Horizon by using a phone to scan a room and then recreate it,” yet there’s no definitive timeline for when this feature will be available.