The building spans a 500,000 square-foot piece of property and houses nearly 2,500 employees who develop the world’s most sophisticated graphic processing units (GPUs).

Opening in Fall, 2017, Endeavor’s design by architecture firm Gensler was augmented by advanced NVIDIA® ray tracing technology, a technology that was taken to a whole new level during the process. NVIDIA® Co-Founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wanted to be able to see true, real-time iterations of the project in Virtual Reality (VR) with true light reflected on real materials. To do that, their existing ray tracing needed some work. Now, although VR is making its break into the world of Architecture, it’s never been used like this before.

After the success of its use on this project, NVIDIA® IRAY® (eye-ray) is expected to take Architecture and Lighting Design by storm. According to NVIDIA Director of Technical Marketing Tom Peterson, NVIDIA® IRAY® provides a “physical simulation of light.” And it focuses on "the physics of light," as opposed to an "artistic interpretation of light and shadow."

As day-lighting becomes more and more prevalent in space-making, designers will be able to use the IRAY® software to track the movement of the sun, as well as light, shadow and reflection created by the artificial light distributed by the fixtures we manufacture. And all that on real materials and substrates, allowing designers to make previously unknown changes before building even begins.

Designers at Horton Lees Brogden Lighting Design (HLB) in San Francisco got to use this new tech first hand. As the lighting pros on the Endeavor project, HLB was able to input the photometry from our K2 Series™ floodlights into designs by architecture firm Gensler to verify their specifications would work in harmony with the 245 triangle-shaped skylights in Endeavor’s roof. Even Gensler had removed skylights after viewing them with IRAY® and determining that there were too many in the original design (venturebeat.com).

On the specification of 178 K2 Series™ and 12 Denali Series™ floodlights, HLB’s Vasudha Rathi said, "The Atrium space at night is lit by K2 fixtures [57W/4000K] mounted to the structure. These fixtures provide very subtle light from the top to illuminate the super high ceiling space below."

Project Name: Nvidia Phase 1
Architect: Gensler
Lighting Designer: HLB Lighting
Design Build Electrical Engineer: Redwood Electric
Contractor: Devcon Construction
Photography: © Jason O’Rear