Alibaba Cloud and HTC partner to drive VR adoption

Alibaba Cloud and HTC have announced a new partnership to explore high scalable and price-competitive virtual reality solutions for customers.

The pair will initially focus on developing new solutions to tackle bandwidth allocation, data transmission and data processing needs in areas such as VR video production and VR broadcasting. As one of the growing trends within the telecommunications, media and technology industry, VR the technical challenges as well as the monetary potential has attracted healthy attention in recent months. The data required to effectively run this technology and create a believably immersive world, will be beyond anything the industry has experienced so far.

“Cloud computing has continuously broken the boundaries of what we thought possible, accelerating the rate of innovation,” said Ge JIN, Business Architect Director at Alibaba Cloud. “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.”

Although the HTC business has been faltering in recent years as a sluggish and increasingly competitive smartphone market impacts fortunes, VR has been a shining light for the business. Vive has proved to be one of the prominent products in the potentially lucrative market, and has been touted by some as a means for HTC to return to prominence. While the market is proving to be popular, it is likely to be limited. VR sales will never match the same levels as the smartphone as it is not as universal a product, therefore it remains to be seen how much of a saving impact the technology will have on the HTC business.

What is clear is the link between cloud and VR. 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. VR also requires easily scalable infrastructure to support data rich content, in which cloud can serve to improve efficiency and lower costs for the consumer.