As the ease of constructing and integrating pieces of technological applications like augmented reality becomes more and more accessible, companies producing media content, as well as those consuming it, are looking at how these advances can be applied.

“Those sorts of capabilities give you the ability to tell a story in a way you couldn’t before,” said Jim Blakley (pictured), general manager of visual cloud computing at Intel Corp.

Blakley spoke with Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Among the points their discussion covered were the topics of how these tools are developing, what’s driving that development and where Blakley expects to see some of the most significant uses occurring. (*Disclosure below.)

As a supplier of storage, as well as helping customers develop and customize the role cloud plays in their businesses, Intel is seeing virtualization, IP networks and the move to push all workloads to standard compute platforms as big driving trends across a broad range of enterprises these days.

Something else the company is seeing amongst its media-focused clients is the use of media analytics, which applies artificial intelligence to pieces of video or other imagery to effectively learn its content. This is something Blakley’s also seeing in development among the larger universities, and while he felt that it was still early days for the use of this technology “in terms of real applications, where you can see a result from them,” he was excited by the future potential.

The storage transformation

“In this industry, because the size of the data is so large, moving it from place to place becomes one of the big constraints. So you need to think for your network infrastructure,” Blakley explained, something which is regularly leading companies to a shift into IP-based networks for improved flexibility and cloud deployment.

“Storage is a huge portion of the transformation,” Blakley added. “The initial seeds usually come out of the CTO office, or whoever is looking at the edge of technology and pushing the transformation,” with the chief technology officer typically exploring the technology to understand its uses in general and for their specific context.

In these situations, Intel is emphasizing its relationships with other companies and the role it plays to help them adopt these technologies and go through the journey themselves by acting as a technical adviser.

While commercial enterprises, such as movie studios and broadcasters, are a predictably large part of the push to develop these visual cloud developments, Blakley saw potential in some other sectors as well.

One of the primary foci among these is the healthcare industry, which relies heavily on image viewing and cross-referencing, he explained. The other big one, which would lean more toward VR/AR, would be education, including enterprise-based training, as simulation of the equipment used for jobs would be speedier than assigning each trainee their own real machine.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of 2017 NAB Show. (*Disclosure: Western Digital is sponsoring theCUBE’s coverage at the show. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE