High quality 360° Video Rendering and Streaming on the Web: Abstract

The Fraunhofer FOKUS business unit Future Applications and Media (FAME) hosts all the technical know-how needed for the realization of interactive media applications: services that can be converged on multiple media platforms, and personalizable services that enable interaction with a broad array of end devices. In all their work, the experts at FAME make consistent use of Web-based technologies. Moreover, they also play active roles in standardization committees (including ETSI, HbbTV, DASH-IF and W3C), support customers in the development of interoperable solutions, evaluate them and engineer showcases for visualization of their possible functionalities. 360° video is one of the technologies the FAME team is working on. Our primary interest is to bring 360° video experience to large screens like TVs, set-top-boxes and streaming devices (Chromecast, Android TV, …). Our activity is driven by the huge interest from content providers especially from broadcasters to bring 360° video experience to TV. HbbTV is one of the options broadcasters can use to offer this kind of services together with the broadcast service. Our 360° Video Cloud Streaming solution enables high quality 360° video experience on low capability devices, such as Hybrid TVs (HbbTV), or in cases of constrained network connectivity e.g. on mobile devices. In 360° video the full spherical image of any direction of view is available in every moment while the spectator can freely change her individual perspective of view. The delivery of this huge source video material consumes a large bandwidth and results in a considerable processing load for the view projection and rendering. Devices as HbbTV Terminals are not capable, in terms of programmatic features, of performing the necessary image transformations. The Fraunhofer FOKUS 360° Video Cloud Streaming performs the rendering of the individual view on server side so that only the selected video content is streamed to the end device. This reduces the bandwidth needed or allows for a higher quality video delivered on a given bandwidth. It also diminishes the requirements for the end device to simply play back a usual video stream in order to provide the full 360° video experience. our solution allows content providers and broadcasters to provide an innovative video experience on traditional TV screens. Viewers can experience video content with freely selectable views on their primary video viewing device using the TV remote control. This solution i