Intel doubles down on Project Alloy VR as the savior of the PC
Intel doubles down on Project Alloy as the savior of the
PC
The jury's still out on whether anyone's going to buy
Intel's VR vision, though.
By Mark Hachman Senior Editor, PCWorld Aug 17, 2016 3:00
AM
Your PC is bored. Your smartphone is, too. While you’re
reading this story, your digital device is twiddling its thumbs, waiting for
you to do something. When a smartphone can offer enough computing power for
most tasks without breaking a sweat, you can understand why PC sales are
tanking—and why Intel’s so enamored with virtual reality.
Intel announced the Project Alloy virtual-reality headset
on Tuesday at its Intel Developer Forum, as well as the next-generation Kaby
Lake microprocessor. Kaby Lake PCs are scheduled to ship in the fall. Intel
executives positioned both announcements in the context of VR: Alloy for
consuming VR content, and Kaby Lake for producing it.
A few months ago, Intel executives began promoting
virtual reality as the leading edge of the PC, especially VR headsets like the
Oculus Rift that depend on the PC for their processing power. “Virtual reality is very computationally
intensive, and if Intel can create a requirement for more computationally
intensive applications, then guess what? That works for them,” said Nathan
Brookwood, principal at Insight64, an microprocessor analyst firm.
Intel expects the worlds of virtual reality—the Oculus
Rift—and augmented reality—the HoloLens—will eventually merge. That’s what
Intel’s latest project, Project Alloy embodies: a device that primarily
projects a virtual reality environment around the user, but incorporates
aspects of augmented reality, too.
Alloy uses a pair of RealSense cameras to “see” physical
objects like a user’s hand, and project them into the virtual space. “We think
this is going to be big,” Krzanich said during his IDF keynote Tuesday. “It’s
so different than anything else that’s out there right now.”
Beginning in the middle of 2017, Intel plans to
open-source the Alloy hardware, so any of its traditional hardware partners can
jump on the Alloy bandwagon. Alloy runs on Windows Holographic, the Microsoft
operating system that powers its HoloLens. Also midway through 2017, Microsoft
plans a free upgrade to Windows 10 that will allow Windows Holographic devices
to interact with the millions of Windows 10 PCs already in the market.
It’s easy to imagine what both Intel and Microsoft hope
will happen next: Devices like Project Alloy become the next big thing, selling
millions of PCs with Intel microprocessors and Windows 10 licenses. Alloy and
its cousins will become PCs you can strap to your face.
It almost sounds like Project Alloy could be Intel’s
version of the Microsoft Surface—a game-changing product that could lead the
way into an entirely new category of products. But it’s still not clear whether
Alloy represents a product unto itself, or just a reference design that the
company will provide to its partners.
For now, Intel is in the “other” category until we better
know what Intel’s plans are, Jon Peddie of JPR said in an email.
An uncertain future
If this all sounds like a desperate attempt to latch on
to the latest trend—well, you’re not alone. Unit sales of VR devices aren’t
expected to take off until 2018 or so, if that, according to Jon Peddie
Research. And it’s not clear what will drive the technology industry until
then.
In fact, we actually have a better idea of what will
drive the technology industry after VR devices: self-driving cars. BMW
executives appeared onstage to reveal their plans to ship cars that allow a
driver to take his or her eyes of the road by 2020 or 2021. Also on Tuesday
(but separate from IDF), Ford announced plans to build fully self-driving cars
in the same timeframe.
Ford plans to triple its fleet of autonomous research
vehicles in 2016, and triple it again in 2017, on its way to mass production of
self-driving cars by 2021.
As Insight 64’s Brookwood noted, the amount of silicon
and intelligence a self-driving car requires vastly outweighs what today’s
automobiles require. Products that require sophisticated processors to crunch
massive amounts of data provide opportunity to raise Intel’s profile once
again.
The bottom line, though, is that a self-driving car sells
itself. Virtual reality? Merged reality? The jury’s still out.
There is hope, though. Kathleen Maher, an analyst with
JPR, said the ramifications of virtual reality in the workplace and the home
aren’t yet fully understood. “It’s been
a big wake-up call for me, that virtual reality replaces the abstractions we’ve
been using, like pages and text,” she said. “That’s a really long-term view,
but Intel has to be thinking of the long term.”
Comments
Post a Comment