IFA 2018: High-definition video footage enters Virtual Reality

Streaming high-quality VR360 panoramic video with resolutions up to 8K consumes large amounts of bandwidth. Moreover, the encoded video requires decoding capabilities beyond 4K video at the receiving end, e.g. on VR glasses with a mobile phone.

Fully standardized tile-based streaming solves these issues by spatially segmenting the panoramic video into tiles. Each tile is encoded with HEVC at the original high-definition and an additional low-definition resolution.

The new MPEG-OMAF standard allows to package the HEVC tile streams in a way that the receiver, e.g. VR glasses or a TV screen, can request the high-definition tiles for the user's viewport and low-definition tiles for the areas out of sight.

The tiles are aggregated into a single HEVC compliant video stream and decoded with a legacy hardware video decoder on the end device.

At IFA 2018, Fraunhofer HHI showcases a demonstrator for consistent VR 360 degree live video streaming with a resolution higher than 4K.

This includes high-resolution 360-degree video capturing and live rendering by the Fraunhofer HHI Omnicam-360 with a resolution of 10K x 4K, HEVC tile-based live encoding with the Fraunhofer HHI HEVC encoder, packaging according to the MPEG-OMAF viewport-dependent media profile and high-quality playback on VR glasses and TV screens.

https://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases.html