CES 2017: Data in Flight — Seagate's Virtual Tour of 2020 (Video)

Data at rest is storage. Data in flight is experience.

Welcome to 2020. We have entered the world of data in flight. Data is now all around us, accessible through an ever-growing slate of devices we interact with in a variety of ways and using a variety of human senses appropriate to the need.

Wondrous, immersive technologies are triggering explosions in the amount of data created worldwide.

Seagate’s CES presence this year is all about the fun of data-driven technology. So pull back the curtain—and experience data in flight.

Seagate at CES: Pull back the curtain on the future

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, Seagate’s customers, partners, the press and other visitors are experiencing 2020 today by interacting with some of the amazing experiences enabled by our products.

From drones and gaming to the latest in virtual reality and more, Seagate’s booth is almost like a theme park, providing a tour of what we can expect to see in 2020.

“The experiences and the segments that are driving storage are really rich, vibrant and fun,” said Jeff Fochtman, VP of marketing at Seagate. “At the show this year, we’re celebrating things like drone technology, gaming, VR, and creative-professional tools like Red cameras for 8K (video) capture. It’s a whole new world and we want people to step into it and experience the massive amount of data that it’s creating.”

Virtual Art and a Scary Plank Walk

Ordinary moments are turning into captivating experiences thanks to the data-fueled magic of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Imagine stepping into a world where you become encircled by a three-dimensional masterpiece — that you’re painting. That world is here, and you can see it in Google Tilt Brush.

A Tilt Brush zone in Seagate’s suite shows what it’s like to paint in 4D space with VR gear. Our demo of this new creative technology from Google will showcase various artists during our CES event. Since this is a digital medium, it’s easy to view and share this next generation of artistic expression.

With a swipe of a digital brush users wearing a connected HTC Vive Headset can paint life-sized, three dimensional strokes of just about anything. Many believe it’s going to revolutionize how people are going to view immersive artworks.

And for the thrill-seeking set, check out our adjacent “Walk the Plank” VR zone — this experience whisks visitors to the 50^th floor of a virtual skyscraper, where they can hop off an elevator and walk a plank into space, complete with the feel of wind whipping about them.

Drones for service, drones for creativity

A drone zone staffed by reps from popular drone-maker (and Seagate partner) DJI, meanwhile, shows what it’s like for a creative pro to capture aerial video of the Eiffel Tower.

The meteoric rise of drone technology has dozens of commercial and public service applications, from search and rescue, security and conservation to unmanned cargo delivery. But nothing will get your propeller spinning like the mesmerizing creative use of drones like DJI’s aerial video masterpieces.

“DJI users alone captured 560 million photos and videos last year,” said Fochtman. “Drones are a new segment of video capture that’s creating an enormous amount of data.”

E-sports champs in the Gaming Zone

Our gaming zone features members of Team Empire, a professional e-sports team based in Russia and a Seagate partner, who are using a gaming rig equipped with Seagate’s new 2TB FireCuda drive. Seagate’s also showcasing its new Game Drive for Xbox SSD drive, among other storage solutions for gamers.

“The FireCuda drive loads games faster and really improves the overall experience for both casual and professional gamers,” said Kirill Khayrullin, head of media for Team Empire, taking a break from playing Overwatch.

Cultural preservation in 3D

Also, CyArk, the Oakland, California-based non-profit organization that is working to digitally preserve many of the world’s at-risk cultural heritage sites, is on hand to discuss its projects in partnership with Seagate.

CyArk is capturing detailed digital representations of the world’s significant cultural heritage sites — places like Mount Rushmore, Skara Brae in Scotland, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and Jerash in Jordan — before they’re lost to natural disasters, destroyed by human aggression or ravaged by the passage of time.

CyArk will have preserved over 500 sites by 2020. They’re using multiple methods, including high-definition photography, drones from our partner DJI and cutting-edge 3D laser scanner technology (they’ve set up an example in our CES space), to be able to record these sites’ visual and topographical data down to a resolution of a couple of millimeters.

CyArk is also showing visitors its Virtual Reality recreations of these sites, which enable the company to let students experience the many preserved sites — from ancient Greece and Babylon, to the Sydney Opera House and the Tower of London — in three-dimensional tours.

The Enterprise Zone, where data flies, lives and is accessed by the world

And finally, our enterprise zone features some of the technology that lets creators and the world share, spread and interact with information in real-time and at the speed of electrons. Our demonstration lets visitors use augmented reality to take a virtual peek inside Seagate’s ClusterStor storage system. Augmented reality (AR) enables designers, analysts or learners interact with virtual objects within their real-world surroundings. With our demo, a few taps on a tablet opens the enclosures to show visitors the HDDs and SSDs hidden inside these storage systems that power data centers around the globe.

From keeping better tabs on chronic illness to helping businesses leverage the right data, enterprise storage in data centers helps solve the toughest human challenges. How much data will data centers be processing by 2020? Analysts predict 677,000,000 Terabytes of storage will ship into the enterprise market that year!

Check out the videos below to experience a bit of the world of tomorrow for yourself.

World of Tomorrow: Virtual reality for fun and profit

Seagate’s Jeff Fochtman leads a tour of Seagate’s VR Zones for consumers and creative pros.

Gaming Zone: e-sports champs Team Empire

Seagate’s Eber Legarreta gives a tour of Seagate’s Gaming Zone, featuring Team Empire, our friends and world-class e-sports team, who broadcast their Overwatch competition from the booth this week on Twitch.tv