Recently, HTC and Alibaba Cloud have tied up and announced the world. Alibaba Cloud will use cloud services to promote the development of HTC's VR ecological layout and explore new solutions for cloud computing and VR technologies.
For HTC, they are in the eyes of Alibaba Cloud's cloud computing value and the Alibaba behind it. In Ali's view, considering the layout of the VR industry, it is reasonable to cooperate with HTC, the largest PC VR manufacturer in China. .
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"Cloud Service + VR" is hot, so many are playing this way
In the technology circle, cloud computing and VR are all hot topics.
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When Tencent released its own VR plan last year, it announced that it would use Tencent Cloud to launch a solution for the VR industry. Tencent Cloud will provide technologies including higher computer performance, object storage services, and voice recognition capabilities to help VR developers solve content and hardware issues.
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Prior to Tencent, LeTV also launched the VR cloud platform. The focus of LeTV's attention was on VR video content. They hope to ensure the real-time, smooth and clear VR video content through the support of LeTV Cloud, and even on-demand and live broadcast of 4K content.
In addition to the bulk of Tencent or LeTV, some domestic small-scale cloud service companies have chosen to provide solutions for VR video, such as cloud media, and they said that they will provide real-time panoramic splicing and high-traffic real-time distribution of VR video on their cloud platforms.
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Hewlett-Packard launched a "cloud VR service" at the beginning of the year to allow low-end laptops to play VR content. HP's main cloud service is similar to cloud games. Users accept video content through video streaming.
What makes people speechless is that after Tencent, LeTV, and HP launched the VR solution based on cloud services, the subsequent progress was not as good as it was originally. What's the problem?
"Cloud Service + VR", powerful and powerful can be invincible in the world?
When it comes to cloud services, its use is more tied to cloud computing for big data. Once the cloud service platform is provided, the huge computer processing resources will be successfully applied to VR, which will bring disruptive changes to the entire VR industry.
Cloud rendering lets VR get rid of the shackles of hardware. Considering the fluency of the picture and the better VR experience, the VR content has extremely strict requirements on hardware, especially the computer's CPU and GPU's computational requirements are very high. To solve this problem, cloud services can use super-core servers or even GPU clusters to help render the rendered scenes back to the terminal devices, thereby reducing the VR requirements for terminal hardware devices.
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For example, if HTC Vive uses Alibaba Cloud's ultra-large-scale data processing capabilities, it will only need to let the cloud perform graphics processing later, and no longer rely on physical PC host devices. When playing VR games or watching VR videos, all the tasks are thrown to the cloud service, which will greatly reduce the hardware cost of the VR experience, get rid of the long tail connected behind the head, which helps a wide range of VR devices. Popularize and promote.
However, the ideal is plump, and reality is skinny. The combination of cloud services and VR is still more of an idea.
Cloud Service + VR, just a mirage
If you want to achieve the above vision, cloud services need strong wireless transmission technology, but the current network bandwidth simply does not meet the requirements. For example, if you play VR games, if you discard local storage and use cloud computing, the resulting network delay can be fatal. In this second, you are shooting at the enemy. When data is transmitted, your eyes will be a large mosaic. The bullets are still on the way. You may have been dead. Moreover, the VR devices used by current VR vendors are jagged and each has its own method of optimization. It is even more difficult to handle optimization in the cloud.
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Cloud rendering requires high server requirements. Compared with conventional cloud computing, VR requires cloud rendering for the back-end server system requirements, it requires at least a few times higher than the cloud computing hardware performance to dozens of times, which means that providing cloud rendering services The computing system will be very large. As a pioneer of cloud computing, IBM and Sun are unable to independently develop a cloud rendering platform, because the core of the task of cloud rendering is the GPU, and then the CPU.
A good VR experience also requires real-time 3D computer graphics technology, wide-angle stereoscopic display technology, user motion tracking technology, and sensory feedback technology, human-machine speech interaction, and so on. The high performance requirements of these technologies all pose challenges to the cloud processing capabilities and storage capabilities behind them.
Therefore, on the whole, the limitations of cloud computing services and network bandwidth at the current stage may not allow VR to take advantage of cloud services.
For HTC, they are in the eyes of Alibaba Cloud's cloud computing value and the Alibaba behind it. In Ali's view, considering the layout of the VR industry, it is reasonable to cooperate with HTC, the largest PC VR manufacturer in China. .
"Cloud Service + VR" is hot, so many are playing this way
In the technology circle, cloud computing and VR are all hot topics.
When Tencent released its own VR plan last year, it announced that it would use Tencent Cloud to launch a solution for the VR industry. Tencent Cloud will provide technologies including higher computer performance, object storage services, and voice recognition capabilities to help VR developers solve content and hardware issues.
Prior to Tencent, LeTV also launched the VR cloud platform. The focus of LeTV's attention was on VR video content. They hope to ensure the real-time, smooth and clear VR video content through the support of LeTV Cloud, and even on-demand and live broadcast of 4K content.
In addition to the bulk of Tencent or LeTV, some domestic small-scale cloud service companies have chosen to provide solutions for VR video, such as cloud media, and they said that they will provide real-time panoramic splicing and high-traffic real-time distribution of VR video on their cloud platforms.
Hewlett-Packard launched a "cloud VR service" at the beginning of the year to allow low-end laptops to play VR content. HP's main cloud service is similar to cloud games. Users accept video content through video streaming.
What makes people speechless is that after Tencent, LeTV, and HP launched the VR solution based on cloud services, the subsequent progress was not as good as it was originally. What's the problem?
"Cloud Service + VR", powerful and powerful can be invincible in the world?
When it comes to cloud services, its use is more tied to cloud computing for big data. Once the cloud service platform is provided, the huge computer processing resources will be successfully applied to VR, which will bring disruptive changes to the entire VR industry.
Cloud rendering lets VR get rid of the shackles of hardware. Considering the fluency of the picture and the better VR experience, the VR content has extremely strict requirements on hardware, especially the computer's CPU and GPU's computational requirements are very high. To solve this problem, cloud services can use super-core servers or even GPU clusters to help render the rendered scenes back to the terminal devices, thereby reducing the VR requirements for terminal hardware devices.
For example, if HTC Vive uses Alibaba Cloud's ultra-large-scale data processing capabilities, it will only need to let the cloud perform graphics processing later, and no longer rely on physical PC host devices. When playing VR games or watching VR videos, all the tasks are thrown to the cloud service, which will greatly reduce the hardware cost of the VR experience, get rid of the long tail connected behind the head, which helps a wide range of VR devices. Popularize and promote.
However, the ideal is plump, and reality is skinny. The combination of cloud services and VR is still more of an idea.
Cloud Service + VR, just a mirage
If you want to achieve the above vision, cloud services need strong wireless transmission technology, but the current network bandwidth simply does not meet the requirements. For example, if you play VR games, if you discard local storage and use cloud computing, the resulting network delay can be fatal. In this second, you are shooting at the enemy. When data is transmitted, your eyes will be a large mosaic. The bullets are still on the way. You may have been dead. Moreover, the VR devices used by current VR vendors are jagged and each has its own method of optimization. It is even more difficult to handle optimization in the cloud.
Cloud rendering requires high server requirements. Compared with conventional cloud computing, VR requires cloud rendering for the back-end server system requirements, it requires at least a few times higher than the cloud computing hardware performance to dozens of times, which means that providing cloud rendering services The computing system will be very large. As a pioneer of cloud computing, IBM and Sun are unable to independently develop a cloud rendering platform, because the core of the task of cloud rendering is the GPU, and then the CPU.
A good VR experience also requires real-time 3D computer graphics technology, wide-angle stereoscopic display technology, user motion tracking technology, and sensory feedback technology, human-machine speech interaction, and so on. The high performance requirements of these technologies all pose challenges to the cloud processing capabilities and storage capabilities behind them.
Therefore, on the whole, the limitations of cloud computing services and network bandwidth at the current stage may not allow VR to take advantage of cloud services.