In an announcement today Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has revealed a strategic partnership with HTC Corporation to explore high scalable and price-competitive virtual reality (VR) solutions.
The focus of the new partnership will be on developing innovative solutions to tackle bandwidth allocation, data transmission and data processing needs for VR video production and VR broadcasting among other areas. The companies also plan to bring together developers to build a VR cloud ecosystem, while extending HTC’s VR app store, Viveport to Alibaba Cloud’s computing platform.
“Cloud computing has continuously broken the boundaries of what we thought possible, accelerating the rate of innovation. The partnership between Alibaba Cloud and HTC will bring two of the world’s most disruptive technologies together to bring more value to businesses looking to leverage VR and cloud. This partnership will accelerate the development of VR technology in China and encourage widespread, global adoption.” said Ge JIN, Business Architect Director at Alibaba Cloud.
Combining VR technology and cloud computing should greatly benefit the production and quality of immersive content. With the added algorithm capacity and infrastructure provided by cloud computing technology, VR could be enhanced by minimizing system crashes, conserving bandwidth, increasing definition, improving efficiency and lower operation costs.
For example Alibaba Cloud recently helped a VR team from Zhejiang University to render a three-minute 360-degree VR video in only 3 days. The required computing capacity for the video was 100,000 processor cores, equivalent to non-stop processing by a 12-core high performance server for more than 8,000 hours.
“We are excited to partner with Alibaba Cloud, as we believe it will be a landmark collaboration between the VR and cloud computing industries. By utilizing the cloud computing expertise and enabling 500k developer community built on Alibaba Cloud, HTC Vive will be able to provide more reliable resources to VR content developers, while delivering smoother access and richer content to VR consumers on our Viveport content store in China.” said Alvin Wang Graylin, China Regional President of Vive, HTC.
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