Huawei has released its Virtual Reality (VR) OpenLab industry cooperation plan, at Ultra-Broadband Forum (UBBF 2017) in China.

The strategy of Huawei is to promote Cloud VR, facilitate technological innovations, incubate business scenarios, and construct Cloud VR industry ecosystem.

VR development in games, videos, and live broadcast will increase in the next two years, according to Gartner’s 2017 Hype Cycle for emerging technologies. Due to the characteristics of Cloud VR, which include lightweight terminals, low costs, and cloud rendering, deployment can be achieved rapidly on a large scale, making Cloud VR an inevitable trend of future VR development.

Cloud VR poses higher latency and bandwidth requirements on the backhaul network, which means current network architecture and technologies are still unable to effectively support Cloud VR.

The VR OpenLab industry cooperation plan aims to help upstream and downstream partners jointly explore the development path of the Cloud VR industry. VR OpenLab will focus on four research directions: business application scenarios, service solutions, bearer network innovations, and operators’ service implementation.

Huawei will focus on supporting the development of the cooperation plan relying on iLab. Huawei will be providing a 1,000 m2 R&D lab, E2E network devices, and dozens of experts, for innovations, facilitating business success. Currently, 30 partners have already joined the VR OpenLab industry cooperation plan.

During UBBF 2017, Huawei and partners jointly demonstrated multiple innovations, including Cloud VR videos, Cloud VR games, VR live broadcast, remote large-space VR e-Sports and live broadcast, VR social fitness, and VR music.