Toward hyper-realistic and interactive social VR experiences in live TV scenarios

© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Social Virtual Reality (VR) allows multiple distributed users getting together in shared virtual environments to socially interact and/or collaborate. This article explores the applicability and potential of Social VR in the broadcast sector, focusing on a live TV show use case. For such a purpose, a novel and lightweight Social VR platform is introduced. The platform provides three key outstanding features compared to state-of-the-art solutions. First, it allows a real-time integration of remote users in shared virtual environments, using realistic volumetric representations and affordable capturing systems, thus not relying on the use of synthetic avatars. Second, it supports a seamless and rich integration of heterogeneous media formats, including 3D scenarios, dynamic volumetric representation of users and (live/stored) stereoscopic 2D and 180º/360º videos. Third, it enables low-latency interaction between the volumetric users and a video-based presenter (Chroma keying), and a dynamic control of the media playout to adapt to the session’s evolution. The production process of an immersive TV show to be able to evaluate the experience is also described. On the one hand, the results from objective tests show the satisfactory performance of the platform. On the other hand, the promising results from user tests support the potential impact of the presented platform, opening up new opportunities in the broadcast sector, among others.This work has been partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program, under agreement nº 762111 (VRTogether project), and partially by ACCIÓ, under agreement COMRDI18-1-0008 (ViVIM project). Work by Mario Montagud has been additionally funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities with a Juan de la Cierva – Incorporación grant (reference IJCI-2017-34611). The authors would also like to thank the EU H2020 VRTogether project consortium for their relevant and valuable contributions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Integration of Multisensorial Stimuli and Multimodal Interaction in a Hybrid 3DTV System

This article proposes the integration of multisensorial stimuli and multimodal interaction components into a sports multimedia asset under two dimensions: immersion and interaction. The first dimension comprises a binaural audio system and a set of sensory effects synchronized with the audiovisual content, whereas the second explores interaction through the insertion of interactive 3D objects into the main screen and on-demand presentation of additional information in a second touchscreen. We present an end-to-end solution integrating these components into a hybrid (internet-broadcast) television system using current 3DTV standards. Results from an experimental study analyzing the perceived quality of these stimuli and their influence on the Quality of Experience are presented

Subjective Quality Assessment of the Impact of Buffer Size in Fine-Grain Parallel Video Encoding

Fine-Grain parallelism is essential for real-time video encoding performance. This usually implies setting a fixed buffer size for each encoded block. The choice of this parameter is critical for both performance and hardware cost. In this paper we analyze the impact of buffer size on image subjective quality, and its relation with other encoding parameters. We explore the consequences on visual quality, when minimizing buffer size to the point of causing the discard of quantized coefficients for highest frequencies. Finally, we propose some guidelines for the choice of buffer size, that has proven to be heavily dependent, in addition to other parameters, on the type of sequence being encoded. These guidelines are useful for the design of efficient realtime encoders, both hardware and software

MPEG-SCORM : ontologia de metadados interoperáveis para integração de padrões multimídia e e-learning

Orientador: Yuzo IanoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: A convergência entre as mídias digitais propõe uma integração entre as TIC, focadas no domínio do multimídia (sob a responsabilidade do Moving Picture Experts Group, constituindo o subcomitê ISO / IEC JTC1 SC29), e as TICE, (TIC para a Educação, geridas pelo ISO / IEC JTC1 SC36), destacando-se os padrões MPEG, empregados na forma de conteúdo e metadados para o multimídia, e as TICE, aplicadas à Educação a Distância, ou e-Learning (o aprendizado eletrônico). Neste sentido, coloca-se a problemática de desenvolver uma correspondência interoperável de bases normativas, atingindo assim uma proposta inovadora na convergência entre as mídias digitais e as aplicações para e-Learning, essencialmente multimídia. Para este fim, propõe-se criar e aplicar uma ontologia de metadados interoperáveis para web, TV digital e extensões para dispositivos móveis, baseada na integração entre os padrões de metadados MPEG-21 e SCORM, empregando a linguagem XPathAbstract: The convergence of digital media offers an integration of the ICT, focused on telecommunications and multimedia domain (under responsibility of the Moving Picture Experts Group, ISO/IEC JTC1 SC29), with the ICTE (the ICT for Education, managed by the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36), highlighting the MPEG formats, featured as content and as description metadata potentially applied to the Multimedia or Digital TV and as a technology applied to e-Learning. Regarding this, it is presented the problem of developing an interoperable matching for normative bases, achieving an innovative proposal in the convergence between digital Telecommunications and applications for e-Learning, both essentially multimedia. To achieve this purpose, it is proposed to creating a ontology for interoperability between educational applications in Digital TV environments and vice-versa, simultaneously facilitating the creation of learning metadata based objects for Digital TV programs as well as providing multimedia video content as learning objects for Distance Education. This ontology is designed as interoperable metadata for the Web, Digital TV and e-Learning, built on the integration between MPEG-21 and SCORM metadata standards, employing the XPath languageDoutoradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaDoutor em Engenharia ElétricaCAPE

Data compression and transmission aspects of panoramic videos

Panoramic videos are effective means for representing static or dynamic scenes along predefined paths. They allow users to change their viewpoints interactively at points in time or space defined by the paths. High-resolution panoramic videos, while desirable, consume a significant amount of storage and bandwidth for transmission. They also make real-time decoding computationally very intensive. This paper proposes efficient data compression and transmission techniques for panoramic videos. A high-performance MPEG-2-like compression algorithm, which takes into account the random access requirements and the redundancies of panoramic videos, is proposed. The transmission aspects of panoramic videos over cable networks, local area networks (LANs), and the Internet are also discussed. In particular, an efficient advanced delivery sharing scheme (ADSS) for reducing repeated transmission and retrieval of frequently requested video segments is introduced. This protocol was verified by constructing an experimental VOD system consisting of a video server and eight Pentium 4 computers. Using the synthetic panoramic video Village at a rate of 197 kb/s and 7 f/s, nearly two-thirds of the memory access and transmission bandwidth of the video server were saved under normal network traffic.published_or_final_versio

Teach phenomenology the bomb: Starship Troopers, the technologized body, and humanitarian warfare

Paul Verhoeven's SF films are often concerned with how the future body will be reshaped as a technological device. Starship Troopers strangely departs from Verhoeven's own work, other SF films, and current directions in cultural theory by seeing the future body as one that is more organic than mechanical. Drawing upon and challenging ideas developed by Paul Virilio, this article argues that Starship Troopers' departure from the notion of the 'post-human' mechanized body needs to be understood not as a nostalgic reassertion of de-technologized subjectivity. Rather, Verhoeven's film sees the idea of the pure body as a dangerous anachronism. And, this article further argues, Starship Troopers suggests that narratives of human salvation - such as those that arose during Nato's interventions in the Balkans - often conceal an appetite for territorial conquest