Amazon Lumberyard, SpeedTree, and NVIDIA unveiled ORCA (Open Research Content Archive).
Critical for computer graphics R&D is open access to large, high-quality 3D assets, such as those seen in video games and movies. The lack of 3D content is a long-standing problem in the research community, which is limited to using assets that are not representative of the challenges involved in rendering a realistic virtual world. Until now, professional 3D content has been unavailable to researchers due to copyright restrictions and it being tied to complex game or film production software. ORCA solves these problems with a collection of professionally-created assets donated by industry leaders. The assets come in a common interchange format (FBX) with a permissive license so that they can be used in any research codebase.
The thing here is that the project was launched with a bunch of free scenes and assets contributed from each of the founding partners, including:
ORCA is the first step in bringing production-quality assets to the research community. We call upon other companies, especially in the game and film industry, to join us in contributing to this library. Researchers inventing algorithms using the rich 3D assets in ORCA will tackle entirely new problems, create battle-tested algorithms ready for production, and move the entire field ahead faster.
NVIDIA also presented a new version of Falcor, the open-source real-time rendering research software framework. The platform now supports both DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs, and provides first-class support for the ORCA assets.
You can find more details on the collaboration here.