Dell’s to move its VR content creation to the cloud

In an effort to move company’s VR content creation into the cloud with new computing products it plans to release, Dell wants to prove that you don’t need a high-end GPU in your computer to create content for virtual reality headsets. The objective is to add extra mobility and security to VR content creation.

Among the new products planned are thin clients that run applications stored in remote servers or appliances. The servers will have GPUs that power VR content creation on virtual desktops. To explain further, Jeff McNaught, executive director of cloud client computing at Dell, said “Virtual reality is an interesting market, and Dell will have products to talk about in the future.”

Some products provide the linchpin to get the effort started, McNaught said. The company recently released the Latitude E7270 Wyse mobile thin client, which has an Intel Skylake chip and an integrated GPU to handle client-side graphics. While in May they 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.

Servers are getting busier processing data, as more data moves into the cloud. Thin clients are already being used to create engineering applications and animation. It is also possible to deliver VR content over the web with emerging protocols like WebVR, which is under development but has already been integrated into Chrome and Firefox browsers. VR content creation on thin clients via centralized servers has its benefits, McNaught said. The data is secure on servers. Multiple thin client users can access the files on the servers and collaborate on content creation.

The company sells mobile and desktop thin clients with Windows, Linux and ThinOS, which is a proprietary Wyse OS. Thin clients are used in offices, airports, hospitals, classrooms, retail stores, casinos and other locations. Well they have also built in local and cloud-based security features into its thin clients.