In the heart of Silicon Valley, you can slip on a virtual reality headset and fly through a photo-realistic three-dimensional building that will soon be the new corporate home for the chip makerNvidia.

The building is still under construction, visible today as a large white frame with an undulating roof that is evocative of both an airplane wing and a circus tent. Scheduled to open in late 2017, the $380 million project will house 2,500 employees. A second building is also on the drawing board.

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Mr. Huang hired the design firm Gensler for the project, working with the architect Hao Ko to capture Nvidia’s culture of being open, collaborative and flexible in the building design.

To make real the notion of light filtering from above, they began with a scattered array of triangle-shaped skylights. The triangle is emblematic of the basic graphical component of modern software rendering systems that create 3-D graphical images that the Nvidia hardware generates.

Other architectural elements soon fell into place: The building would be surrounded by a park, and parking would be hidden in an underground garage. To foster collaboration, the designers also effectively created a choke point in the building — people entering from the underground parking structure will emerge onto a broad central staircase.

The headquarters are also reconfigurable, based largely around Wi-Fi, not cables. Walls are largely movable. And in a nod to Nvidia’s flat corporate hierarchy, there will be no discernible executive suite.

Nvidia’s technology soon began to help with the process. The company used more than 100 of its graphical processors to create what Mr. Huang described as the “world’s largest simulator of photons.”

“We simulated every light beam for every hour of the day for every day of the year,” he said.

As a result, software made it possible to find hot spots in the new building. That enabled the designers to move people away from the heat and yet maintain a warm work setting.