Alliance for Open Media codecs

Blue_MiSfit · 14th January 2021, 21:14

Another aspect of VR is that when it comes to pre-produced content you're effectively rendering a 360 degree scene and then using equirectangular projection to fit that into a standard video frame size. During playback the player wraps that video inside a sphere and drops your viewport inside of that sphere. This means that you actually look at a small piece of the video. With a ~4K video and a ~2.5K head mounted display / headset with a typical FOV you're going to be looking at maybe 1/4 of the encoded resolution. The player of course has to upscale to hit the native HMD display. All of this means that you're basically watching sub HD video on a very dense screen as close as your eyes can focus

360 video is generally pretty boring, but to really maximize the potential you'd basically want a 16k video. Some companies (Pixvana) tried to get around this by cutting the video into slices and only streaming one or two at a time. This theoretically lets you get higher resolution during playback and lower bandwidth (since you're not streaming / decoding / processing everything you can't see). Ultimately 360 video just does not scale though, and the lack of parallax is disturbing and uncomfortable for many. Here's hoping for lots of neat developments in light field capture, compression, and delivery. The guys at Lytro were doing wild and crazy stuff a few years ago before they ran out of money. I wonder what Google is doing with all that IP...

14th January 2021, 21:14	#11 \| Link
Blue_MiSfit Derek Prestegard IRL Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: Los Angeles Posts: 5,989	Another aspect of VR is that when it comes to pre-produced content you're effectively rendering a 360 degree scene and then using equirectangular projection to fit that into a standard video frame size. During playback the player wraps that video inside a sphere and drops your viewport inside of that sphere. This means that you actually look at a small piece of the video. With a ~4K video and a ~2.5K head mounted display / headset with a typical FOV you're going to be looking at maybe 1/4 of the encoded resolution. The player of course has to upscale to hit the native HMD display. All of this means that you're basically watching sub HD video on a very dense screen as close as your eyes can focus 360 video is generally pretty boring, but to really maximize the potential you'd basically want a 16k video. Some companies (Pixvana) tried to get around this by cutting the video into slices and only streaming one or two at a time. This theoretically lets you get higher resolution during playback and lower bandwidth (since you're not streaming / decoding / processing everything you can't see). Ultimately 360 video just does not scale though, and the lack of parallax is disturbing and uncomfortable for many. Here's hoping for lots of neat developments in light field capture, compression, and delivery. The guys at Lytro were doing wild and crazy stuff a few years ago before they ran out of money. I wonder what Google is doing with all that IP...