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

Varjo, known for crafting top-tier extended reality headsets, has unveiled a new service designed especially for enterprises. This slick offering brings smartphone-based 3D scanning to the forefront, allowing for swift creation of photorealistic environments that can be explored both in virtual reality and on regular screens.

Dubbed Teleport, this app isn’t free, but it’s a game-changer. It lets you snap and reconstruct real-world spaces in mere minutes, between five to ten by Varjo’s estimates—a huge improvement over the traditionally time-consuming photogrammetry techniques.

If you have an iPhone or iPad that’s running iOS 17 or later, you’re in luck, as these devices can capture the necessary data. This includes a wide range of models from the iPhone XR to the latest offerings, and from the 8th generation iPad onwards.

Once you’ve captured your environment, the digital replicas can be accessed on various devices. Whether you prefer to check them out on your phone or PC, or dive deeper using Varjo’s XR headsets or any other reputable PC VR headset, the choice is yours.

Teleport’s prowess lies in its use of cutting-edge Gaussian Splatting and NVIDIA GPU-trained generative models to process 3D models in the cloud. Once downloaded, these models can be explored offline, with an internet connection needed solely for the initial download.

For those interested, Teleport is available at $30 per month, but Varjo sweetens the deal with a seven-day free trial. During this period, you can examine a variety of captures for free through their web viewer and even enjoy the highest quality versions on a desktop client.

This launch coincides with an expansion of Varjo’s Series D funding round, bringing new investment partners on board like Beyond Capital, Nishikawa Communications, and NVIDIA. While Varjo is keeping the specifics of the latest raise under wraps, they’ve shared with Road to VR that their lifetime funding has now reached about €180 million, equivalent to $188 million USD.

These funds are earmarked to fuel Varjo’s goal of hastening the adoption of its XR hardware and software for industrial purposes. CEO Timo Toikkanen emphasized that Varjo plans to harness AI and machine learning to further bridge the gap between real and virtual spaces, thereby boosting productivity and efficiency for industrial users.

Meanwhile, over on the consumer side of things, Meta is brewing something similar named Horizon Hyperscape, announced back in September. This demo rolls out Meta’s plans for achieving photorealism. Although no exact timeline is given, Meta envisions a future where creators can scan a room with a phone and recreate it within Horizon, underscoring a promising push towards more immersive experiences.