Dell Wants VR Content Creation to Happen in the Cloud

A lot of content creation is already happening in the cloud these days thanks to thin clients and servers packed with high-end GPUs designed just for this kind of workload. With that kind of setups, you don’t need high-end graphics cards in every system and it also increases the productivity when it comes to collaboration on projects. It also adds an extra layer of security as all the files are stored safely on centralized servers rather than the mobile systems that the creators carry around with them, that could get lost, stolen, or break down.

Dell is planning a whole list of new products with VR content creation in mind and among them are thin clients as well as servers that have the power to handle this. “Virtual reality is an interesting market, and Dell will have products to talk about in the future,” said Jeff McNaught, executive director of cloud client computing at Dell.

One of the first products in this initiative was launched on Thursday as Dell released the Latitude E7270 Wyse mobile thin client which has an Intel Skylake chip and an integrated GPU to handle client-side graphics. The company in May also started shipping the Precision Appliance for Wyse, a 2U rack server that can be packed with Nvidia graphics cards to power content creation on thin clients.

This kind of setup is already being used in other areas such as engineering applications and animation, so it is only a natural move for companies to brand out into the exciting new world that VR presents for users and creators alike. It isn’t just the creation that could work cloud-based, it is also possible to deliver VR content over the web with emerging protocols like WebVR which is under development but already been integrated into the Chrome and Firefox browsers.

It will be interesting how well this pans out for Dell, after all, it isn’t all of their thin client projects that have worked out well for them. For example, the Cloud Connect thumb-sized PC, originally called Project Ophelia, failed to live up to customers expectations.