In its bid to enable cloud driven innovation in the VR space, Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, is partnering with HTC Corporation to explore high scalable and price-competitive virtual reality (“VR”) solutions for customers worldwide.
Leveraging the advanced cloud computing technology of Alibaba Cloud, the companies will focus on developing breakthrough innovative solutions to tackle bandwidth allocation, data transmission and data processing needs in areas such as VR video production and VR broadcasting. The partnership will also bring together industry developers to build a VR cloud ecosystem, and extend ‘Viveport’, HTC’s VR app store to Alibaba Cloud’s cloud 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.
“We are excited to partner with Alibaba Cloud, as we believe it will be a landmark collaboration between VR and cloud computing industries. By leveraging computing expertise and the developer ecosystem built on Alibaba Cloud, HTC Vive will provide more reliable, stable services to VR solution developers with better access to China market,” said Alvin Wang Graylin, China Regional President of Vive, HTC.
Cloud computing and VR technology complement each other on commercial applications. With the algorithm capacity and infrastructure provided by cloud computing technology, the ultimate experience of VR can be greatly enhanced by increasing definition, minimizing system crashes and conserving bandwidth. On top of that, the development of VR technology requires powerful and flexible infrastructure support from the backend to supply visually rich and interactive contents to the audiences, in which cloud computing technology can improve the efficiency and lower operation costs.
Alibaba Cloud has successfully helped a VR team from Zhejiang University to render a three-minute 360degree 3D VR video in only 3 days. The required computing capacity for the video was 100,000 processor cores and is the equivalent to non-stop processing by a 12-core high performance server for more than 8,000 hours.
