IBC 2022

Chris Chinnock here for the 8K Monitor. I’m in the V-Nova booth talking to a company called PresenZ. They make volumetric movies and I just had a very nice demonstration of what they’re doing with volumetric capture. The idea is that they can take a VR movie that normally has three degrees of freedom (3DoF) and turn it into a movie that has six degrees of freedom (6DoF). In a typical VR movie or VR content you have one or two camera views that have very limited field of view or viewport. What PresenZ does is create a viewbox instead of a viewport. They do this by working with the original CG content and doing a very complex point cloud computation within this virtual volume. That is typically a very heavy piece of data and has historically been a little bit difficult to stream and render. But now they’ve been working with V-Nova and the LCEVC codec to compress the point cloud significantly. That allows the content to be streamed and played back on a normal sized. Content of this sort would normally be in the 50 to 60 megabits per second data rate for an 4K video frame (actually stereo 2K) that’s hosted in the cloud. With LCEVC they can get that down to 25 to 30 megabits which really brings it into a more mainstream situation. In the demo, which you can see on the screen, it shows a very very big difference between the 3DoF content, which has a limited point of view. For example, you can’t see around objects with 3DoF. But when you create the point cloud you have all this information including occluded data so it creates a much more immersive experience. If you move backwards you can start to see the difference between a viewport and a viewbox. This viewbox is very well defined and that’s how they create this 6DoF image. If you move back into this viewbox, now you’re back in the whole environment and it has a 360 degree view. This is very cool technology from PresenZ. Chris Chinnock for the 8K Monitor.