Alibaba Cloud, HTC to jointly explore VR solutions for enterprises

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, entered into a partnership with HTC Corporation today, with a view to explore high scalable and price-competitive virtual reality solutions for customers worldwide. The duo aim to leverage the cloud computing technology of Alibaba Cloud, helping companies develop innovative solutions to tackle bandwidth allocation, data transmission and data processing needs in areas such as VR video production and VR broadcasting. The partnership also claims to 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. Alvin Wang Graylin, China Regional President of Vive, HTC, said:

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.

Alibaba claims that 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. Furthermore, the company explained that 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. Ge JIN, Business Architect Director, Alibaba Cloud said:

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.

Alibaba Cloud has been recently used by a VR team from Zhejiang University to render a three-minute 360-degree 3D VR video in about 3 days. This move builds on the launch of HTC’s app store, Viveport last week that allows people to engage with other users of the HTC Vive VR headset and other VR customers.