Streaming and User Behaviour in Omnidirectional Videos

Omnidirectional videos (ODVs) have gone beyond the passive paradigm of traditional video, offering higher degrees of immersion and interaction. The revolutionary novelty of this technology is the possibility for users to interact with the surrounding environment, and to feel a sense of engagement and presence in a virtual space. Users are clearly the main driving force of immersive applications and consequentially the services need to be properly tailored to them. In this context, this chapter highlights the importance of the new role of users in ODV streaming applications, and thus the need for understanding their behaviour while navigating within ODVs. A comprehensive overview of the research efforts aimed at advancing ODV streaming systems is also presented. In particular, the state-of-the-art solutions under examination in this chapter are distinguished in terms of system-centric and user-centric streaming approaches: the former approach comes from a quite straightforward extension of well-established solutions for the 2D video pipeline while the latter one takes the benefit of understanding users’ behaviour and enable more personalised ODV streaming

Omnidirectional view and multi-modal streaming in 3D tele-immersion system

3D Tele-immersion (3DTI) technology allows full-body, multi-modal content delivery among geographically dispersed users. In 3DTI, user’s 3D model will be captured by multiple RGB-D (color plus depth) cameras surround- ing user’s body. In addition, various sensors (e.g., motion sensors, medical sensors, wearable gaming consoles, etc.) specified by the application will be included to deliver a multi-modal experience. In a traditional 2D live video streaming system, the interactivity of end users, choosing a specified viewpoint, has been crippled by the fact that they can only choose to see the physical scene captured by a physical camera, but not between two physical cameras. However, 3DTI system makes it possible rendering a 3D space where the viewers can view physical scene from arbitrary viewpoint. In this thesis, we present systematic solutions of omnidirectional view in 3D tele-immersion system in a real-time manner and in an on-demand streaming manner, called FreeViewer and OmniViewer, respectively. we provide a complete multi-modal 3D video streaming/rendering solution, which achieves the feature of omnidirectional view in monoscopic 3D systems