Livestreaming Panoramic Video in Dense User Scenario

Occasionally, technologies combine to create an innovation that is more than just the sum of its parts---something that brings unique capabilities, opens up more use cases, and spurs the formation of new businesses. On all three accords, livestreaming panoramic video is one such example. It offers a truly immersive experience, which has inspired new applications as well as benefitted old ones. Spectators can enjoy virtual presence at sports games and art festivals; medical doctors can perform more effective diagnostic procedures. The two social media titans, YouTube and Facebook, have developed livestreaming and content delivery solutions for panoramic video, which have been made prominent features of the platforms. As immersive technologies continue to advance, panoramic video, both live and on-demand, will likely become ever more ubiquitous. However, one major hurdle that researchers and engineers have devoted much effort to tackle is that panoramic video demands considerable resources, such as network bandwidth, especially when serving many users with high expectations for video quality. Conducted at Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering as a contribution to the EU project 5GENESIS, the project involves designing and implementing a system for livestreaming panoramic video under such circumstances, namely the Festival of Lights in Berlin. All parts of the system are considered: hardware and software; back end and front end. The physical machinery is assembled using off-the-shelf components: a Vivotek panoramic camera, an Nvidia graphics card, and a Ubiquiti wireless access point. The software apparatus consists of a video transcoder based on FFmpeg and a web application based on the open-source video player framework Video.js, for which a new feature is implemented to handle the camera's fisheye projection. As far as the author is aware, this feature makes for the first HTML5-based video player that supports the generalized fisheye projection. The web application is designed for handheld devices. Finally, system performance is assessed through both real-world and simulated experiments. The main finding is that the system works satisfactory and that, with its particular configuration, it can sustain about 70 concurrent users within a 20-meter radius, which accords with the 802.11n wireless networking standard.