Project Mercury, powered by Wacom, and NICE DCV Extension SDK is available for preview

At the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Wacom and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the integration of Project Mercury with NICE DCV. This integration allows users to have a like-local experience with their Wacom digital pen devices while working remotely. With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), you can right-size compute to meet the requirements of your design applications.

What is Project Mercury?

Project Mercury is a Wacom technology that solves key pain points faced by artists and creators working in a distributed workflow. These pain points include input latency, inability to seamlessly use application-specific settings on the local client and remote compute, and more. With Project Mercury’s Inkline feature, artists get the like-local experience while working on cloud workstations, regardless of an inherited network delay. Project Mercury enables redirection of Wacom Wintab APIs and support for the Windows Ink API set. The application-specific driver settings may be configured on the client and applied to the remote applications.

What is NICE DCV?

DCV is the AWS-owned high-performance remote display protocol that provides secure access to remote workloads. This allows creative companies and individual artists access to their specialized applications and business-critical data. The required compute may reside on supported infrastructure, on-premises or cloud, and accessed over varying network conditions. With DCV and Amazon EC2, customers can stream graphics-intensive applications running on accelerated compute to end users without requiring high-end client machines. The DCV streaming protocol is used by AWS managed services, such as the Amazon WorkSpaces family, Amazon Appstream 2.0, and AWS RoboMaker

How does integration work?

Project Mercury integrates with DCV by using the DCV Extension SDK. This recently released SDK is designed by AWS to allow partners and customers to extend the functionality of the DCV protocol. The Project Mercury integration is embedded within the Wacom driver and does not require additional components. This release allows the native functionality of the Wacom tablet to be available simultaneously on both sides, client and server, without depending on USB redirection.

How to get started

Project Mercury is currently in preview. The preview is supported on Windows client and server. To get started, you need access to a DCV server and client running DCV version 2023.0 for Windows. To provision a DCV server, you may use the DCV AWS Marketplace AMI, DCV AWS CloudFormation template, or follow the Documentation for DCV Server on Windows.

To try Project Mercury by Wacom, you need to install the preview version of the Wacom Driver for Windows on both client and server. To access the preview version of the Wacom driver, contact your AWS or Wacom representative. For more information, visit the Project Mercury by Wacom.

Conclusion

With the integration between the DCV protocol and Project Mercury, users will have a like-local Wacom tablet experience when connecting to DCV compute. This brings agility to studios, allowing them to leverage the infrastructure and security of the AWS Cloud without impacting the end user experience. In close collaboration with AWS, Wacom has created technology that opens new possibilities for creative professionals to work remotely and collaborate in real time.