HTC VIVE Teams Up With Mozilla And AWS To Bring Dedicated Virtual Reality Web Browser To Market
New browser integrates seamlessly with Amazon Sumerian to quickly build and deploy websites within Virtual Reality
Fidelity Investments to be first to help consumers analyze investments and collaborate with other users with new platform
LAS VEGAS, Jan. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- HTC VIVE™, the leader in room-scale Virtual Reality (VR), today announced a first of its kind collaboration with Mozilla's Firefox, AWS's Amazon Sumerian, and Fidelity Investments that will enable consumers to bring VR into their everyday life by providing an immersive web browsing experience in VR. Firefox Reality will become Vive's native VR browser, providing a safe and private experience for users.
To easily bring web content into VR, HTC Vive is also working with Amazon Web Services (AWS), whose Amazon Sumerian provides developers and companies toolsets to easily create and launch VR experiences. At CES, the first company to demonstrate on the new platform will be Fidelity Investments, which will enable consumers to review their portfolio in VR through a custom environment built for the new browser.
"We've set out this year to bring everyday computing tasks into VR for the first time," said Michael Almeraris, Vice President of Partnerships and Content, HTC VIVE. "Through the collaboration with Mozilla and Amazon Web Services, we're closing the gap in XR computing, empowering Vive users to get more content in their headset, while enabling developers and businesses to quickly create content for these consumers."
Mozilla Firefox
Today, VR web browsing is cumbersome and difficult to navigate. HTC Vive turned to Mozilla's Firefox to reimagine what a VR Web experience could be. This partnership enables a truly optimized browsing experience in VR for quick and easy searches, access to their favorite websites in VR for shopping, researching, surfing, watching videos and more. Firefox will be the default internet browser for Vive, Vive Pro and the upcoming VIVE Cosmos.
"We're excited to work with Amazon and HTC to ensure that the web is the best way to experience 3D content from the internet on the best VR devices in the market," said Sean White, Chief R&D Officer, Mozilla. "We are bringing Firefox Reality to this platform to ensure that users have a safe, fast, and private experience on the next generation of hardware."
Amazon Sumerian
As part of this relationship, HTC Vive is teaming up with Amazon Sumerian to bring true web VR to the market. Through this collaboration, HTC Vive developers will be able to create highly immersive, VR-optimized websites, without requiring specialized programming experience. Using Sumerian, developers can quickly concept, test and publish VR-optimized websites that are immediately available to internal testers, authenticated users, or for public use. In addition to VR sites, AWS and HTC plan to seamlessly integrate Sumerian with Viveport for publishing any VR experience to the platform, making them available to end users faster than previously possible.
"Many industries are adopting XR technologies for a wide range of uses, including training simulations, virtual concierge services, enhanced online shopping experiences, virtual tours, and more," said Kyle Roche, General Manager, Amazon Sumerian, AWS. "Until now, creating realistic XR experiences required developers to have specialized programming skills and learn unique specifications and deployment procedures, adding complexity to the process. Together with HTC and Mozilla, we're making it easier for developers to more quickly build and distribute VR applications using nothing more than a browser and a URL."
Fidelity Investments
To showcase the full potential of these collaborations, HTC Vive will host Fidelity Investments at their CES VR Showcase at the Wynn Hotel. The Fidelity Investments VR website prototype allows financial customers to immerse themselves in their investments via new data visualization tools and will allow for collaboration between users, such as a family member or a trusted advisor.
"At Fidelity, we're committed to helping people live better financial lives, so we were excited to explore the capabilities of these new technologies," said Adam Schouela, vice president of Product Management at Fidelity's Center for Applied Technology. "The ability for an investor to collaborate with a family member or trusted advisor in a virtual environment opens up new possibilities for how consumers may interact with their finances in the future."
For press images and assets for all Vive CES News, please use this LINK.
About HTC VIVE
VIVE is a first-of-its-kind virtual reality platform, built and optimized for room-scale VR and true-to-life interactions. Delivering on the promise of VR with game-changing technology and best-in-class content, VIVE has created the strongest ecosystem for VR hardware and software, bringing VR to consumers, developers and enterprises alike. The VIVE ecosystem is built around the best VR hardware in market, supported by VIVE X, a $100 million accelerator for VR and related technology start-ups, VIVE, a global platform and app store with the world's first VR subscription model that operates in more than 60 countries, and VIVE Studios, its VR content development and publishing initiative. For more information on VIVE, please visit www.vive.com.
About Mozilla
Mozilla is a pioneer and advocate for the Open Web for more than 15 years. We create and promote open standards that enable innovation and advance the Web as a platform for all. Today, hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Mozilla Firefox to experience the Web on computers, tablets and mobile devices. For more information, visit https://www.mozilla.org.
About Amazon Sumerian
Amazon Sumerian is a browser-based authoring tool from Amazon Web Services designed to create and run for the development and publishing of AR, VR and 3D applications. Using Amazon Sumerian, developers and designers can build immersive apps quickly and easily without requiring any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. Experiences built with Sumerian are designed to be embedded into a web page or be consumed on popular hardware such as HTC Vive and HTC Vive Pro, as well as Android and iOS mobile devices. For more information, please visit https://aws.amazon.com/sumerian/.
About Fidelity Investments
Fidelity's mission is to inspire better futures and deliver better outcomes for the customers and businesses we serve. With assets under administration of $7.4 trillion, including managed assets of $2.6 trillion as of September 30, 2018, we focus on meeting the unique needs of a diverse set of customers: helping more than 28 million people invest their own life savings, 23,000 businesses manage employee benefit programs, as well as providing more than 13,000 financial advisory firms with investment and technology solutions to invest their own clients' money. Privately held for 70 years, Fidelity employs more than 40,000 associates who are focused on the long-term success of our customers. For more information about Fidelity Investments, visit https://www.fidelity.com/about.
HTC, the HTC logo are the trademarks of HTC Corporation. All other names of companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
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