Interactive Steaming of Panoramas and VR Worlds

Virtual reality (VR) has recently become a hot topic in the media industry. VR systems enable the user to navigate in real or virtual worlds. The dimensions of these worlds may range from 180° cylinders up to complete 360° spheres. Such systems require cameras that are able to capture these worlds and transmission systems, which enable users to view these worlds on their VR devices. Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institute (HHI) has developed an interactive streaming system, which provides the highest quality and does not limit the image resolution either on the production or on the end device side. It consists of one or several omnidirectional cameras that can be placed in scenes such as sport stadiums, theaters, and fairs. In HHI's OmniCam360, there are 10 microHD cameras, delivering a 360° panorama of 10.000 x 1.920 pixels. As the data rate of such video is by far too high to be transmitted to an end device, three solutions to stream the content to end devices have been developed. A user can then interactively navigate in the panorama.