A framework for realistic 3D tele-immersion

Meeting, socializing and conversing online with a group of people using teleconferencing systems is still quite differ- ent from the experience of meeting face to face. We are abruptly aware that we are online and that the people we are engaging with are not in close proximity. Analogous to how talking on the telephone does not replicate the experi- ence of talking in person. Several causes for these differences have been identified and we propose inspiring and innova- tive solutions to these hurdles in attempt to provide a more realistic, believable and engaging online conversational expe- rience. We present the distributed and scalable framework REVERIE that provides a balanced mix of these solutions. Applications build on top of the REVERIE framework will be able to provide interactive, immersive, photo-realistic ex- periences to a multitude of users that for them will feel much more similar to having face to face meetings than the expe- rience offered by conventional teleconferencing systems

Optimized mobile thin clients through a MPEG-4 BiFS semantic remote display framework

According to the thin client computing principle, the user interface is physically separated from the application logic. In practice only a viewer component is executed on the client device, rendering the display updates received from the distant application server and capturing the user interaction. Existing remote display frameworks are not optimized to encode the complex scenes of modern applications, which are composed of objects with very diverse graphical characteristics. In order to tackle this challenge, we propose to transfer to the client, in addition to the binary encoded objects, semantic information about the characteristics of each object. Through this semantic knowledge, the client is enabled to react autonomously on user input and does not have to wait for the display update from the server. Resulting in a reduction of the interaction latency and a mitigation of the bursty remote display traffic pattern, the presented framework is of particular interest in a wireless context, where the bandwidth is limited and expensive. In this paper, we describe a generic architecture of a semantic remote display framework. Furthermore, we have developed a prototype using the MPEG-4 Binary Format for Scenes to convey the semantic information to the client. We experimentally compare the bandwidth consumption of MPEG-4 BiFS with existing, non-semantic, remote display frameworks. In a text editing scenario, we realize an average reduction of 23% of the data peaks that are observed in remote display protocol traffic

Remote rendering for virtual reality on mobile devices

Nowadays it is possible to launch complicated VR applications on mobile devices, using simple VR goggles, e.g. Google Cardboard. Nevertheless, this opportunity has not been introduced to the wide use yet. One of the reasons is the low processing power even of the hi-end devices. This is a massive obstacle for mobile VR technologies. One of the solutions is to render the high-quality 3D world on a remote server, streaming the video to the mobile device

Foveated Streaming of Real-Time Graphics

Remote rendering systems comprise powerful servers that render graphics on behalf of low-end client devices and stream the graphics as compressed video, enabling high end gaming and Virtual Reality on those devices. One key challenge with them is the amount of bandwidth required for streaming high quality video. Humans have spatially non-uniform visual acuity: We have sharp central vision but our ability to discern details rapidly decreases with angular distance from the point of gaze. This phenomenon called foveation can be taken advantage of to reduce the need for bandwidth. In this paper, we study three different methods to produce a foveated video stream of real-time rendered graphics in a remote rendered system: 1) foveated shading as part of the rendering pipeline, 2) foveation as post processing step after rendering and before video encoding, 3) foveated video encoding. We report results from a number of experiments with these methods. They suggest that foveated rendering alone does not help save bandwidth. Instead, the two other methods decrease the resulting video bitrate significantly but they also have different quality per bit and latency profiles, which makes them desirable solutions in slightly different situations.Peer reviewe