16K Cinematic VR Streaming Patrice Rondao Alface Nokia Bell Labs Copernicuslaan 50 Antwerp, Belgium 2018 patrice.rondao alface@ nokia-bell-labs.com Maarten Aerts Nokia Bell Labs Copernicuslaan 50 Antwerp, Belgium 2018 maarten.aerts@nokia-bell-labs.com Donny Tytgat Nokia Bell Labs Copernicuslaan 50 Antwerp, Belgium 2018 donny.tytgat@nokia-bell-labs.com Sammy Lievens Nokia Bell Labs Copernicuslaan 50 Antwerp, Belgium 2018 sammy.lievens@nokia-bell-labs.com Christoph Stevens Nokia Bell Labs Copernicuslaan 50 Antwerp, Belgium 2018 christoph.stevens@nokia-bell-labs. com Nico Verzijp Nokia Bell Labs Copernicuslaan 50 Antwerp, Belgium 2018 nico.verzijp@nokia-bell-labs.com Jean-Francois Macq Nokia Bell Labs Copernicuslaan 50 Antwerp, Belgium 2018 jean-francois.macq@nokia-bell-labs. com ABSTRACT We present an end-to-end system for streaming Cinematic Virtual Reality (VR) content (also called 360 or omnidirectional content). Content is captured and ingested at a resolution of 16K at 25Hz and streamed towards untethered mobile VR devices. Besides the usual navigation interactions such as panning and tilting offered by common VR systems, we also provide a zooming interactivity. is allows the VR client to fetch high quality pixels captured at a spatial resolution of 16K that greatly increase perceived quality compared to a 4K VR streaming solution. Since current client de- vices are not capable of receiving and decoding a 16K video, sev- eral optimizations are provided to only stream the required pixels for the current viewport of the user, while meeting strict latency and bandwidth requirements for a qualitative VR immersive expe- rience. CCS CONCEPTS •Computing methodologies →Virtual reality; KEYWORDS Virtual Reality, Streaming Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full cita- tion on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permied. To copy other- wise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. MM’17, October 23–27, 2017, Mountain View, CA, USA. © 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4906-2/17/10. . . $15.00 DOI: hp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3123266.3123307 ACM Reference format: Patrice Rondao Alface, Maarten Aerts, Donny Tytgat, Sammy Lievens, Christoph Stevens, Nico Verzijp, and Jean-Francois Macq. 2017. 16K Cinematic VR Streaming. In Proceedings of MM’17, October 23–27, 2017, Mountain View, CA, USA., , 8 pages. DOI: hp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3123266.3123307 1 INTRODUCTION Virtual Reality (VR) streaming is gaining more and more aention nowadays thanks to disruptions in capture and client devices, en- abling higher resolutions, higher frame rates and lower latencies. is success can also be observed by the increasing number of applications of VR technology that go well beyond gaming and include medical treatment, training, industrial design, entertain- ment, broadcasting etc [1, 2]. Within VR content, while first systems have focused on syn- thetic (i.e. computer-generated) content, more recent works use captured omnidirectional (a.k.a. 360) video. While current head- mounted display (HMD) screen resolutions provide a feeling of immersion with synthetic content, which exhibit smoother pixel transitions, these are not yet sufficient for ultra-high resolution captured video. is can be partially explained by the fact that captured content, even if captured at 4K resolution for the whole sphere 1 , appears as relatively large pixels on a HMD due to the fact only a portion of the sphere can be observed at a time. erefore, the goal of any end-to-end 360 video streaming system is to pro- vide a maximal video resolution and quality for each eye of a user wearing a HMD with a minimal latency and obviously no video freeze. In any manner and at any speed a user moves, pixel quality 1 360 video content can be mapped on a sphere, a cylinder or any composition of 3D meshes that captures the union of the input cameras views. Nowadays, most 360 systems are mapped to a sphere. Session: Systems 2 – Video Streaming MM’17, October 23-27, 2017, Mountain View, CA, USA 1105