Advanced visual rendering, gesture-based interaction and distributed delivery for immersive and interactive media services

The media industry is currently being pulled in the often-opposing directions of increased realism (high resolution, stereoscopic, large screen) and personalisation (selection and control of content, availability on many devices). A capture, production, delivery and rendering system capable of supporting both these trends is being developed by a consortium of European organisations including partners from the broadcast, film, telecoms and academic sectors, in the EU-funded FascinatE project. This paper reports on the latest project developments in the delivery network and end-user device domains, including advanced audiovisual rendering, computer analysis and scripting, content-aware distributed delivery and gesture-based interaction. The paper includes an overview of existing immersive media services and concludes with initial service concept descriptions and their market potential.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Rate-Distortion Optimal Time-Frequency Decompositions for MDCT-based Audio Coding

Abstract not availableElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Interactive UHDTV at the Commonwealth Games : An Explorative Evaluation

In conjunction with BBC R&D experiments and demonstrations at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, an explorative field trial was conducted with a live zoomable UHD video system. The unique field trial featured the world’s first live tiled streaming of 4K UHD video to end users. During the trial, we studied and evaluated the attractiveness and novelty of an interactive UHD application, and investigated system design aspects of a live UHD tiling system. In this paper, we evaluate the overall perceived quality of experience (QoE) of the application and to what extent the QoE depends on system factors and/or network conditions. We observe that interactive UHDTV is well received by users, but the delivered experience may decrease in presence of low bandwidth availabilit

WebVR meets WebRTC: Towards 360-degree social VR experiences

Virtual Reality (VR) and 360-degree video are reshaping the media landscape, creating a fertile business environment. During 2016 new 360-degree cameras and VR headsets entered the consumer market, distribution platforms are being established and new production studios are emerging. VR is evermore becoming a hot topic in research and industry and many new and exciting interactive VR content and experiences are emerging. The biggest gap we see in these experiences are social and shared aspects of VR. In this demo we present our ongoing efforts towards social and shared VR by developing a modular web based VR framework, that extends current video conferencing capabilities with new functionalities of Virtual and Mixed Reality. It allows us to connect two people together for mediated audio-visual interaction, while being able to engage in interactive content. Our framework allows to run extensive technological and user based trials in order to evaluate VR experiences and to build immersive multi-user interaction spaces. Our first results indicate that a high level of engagement and interaction between users is possible in our 360-degree VR set-up utilizing current web technologies. © 2017 IEEE. IEEE Computer Society, Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC

Impact of Social Media on TV Content Consumption : New Market Strategies, Scenarios and Trends

The mass adoption of Social Media together with the proliferation and widely usage of multi-connected companion devices have tremendously transformed the TV/video consumption paradigm, opening the door to a new range of possibilities. This Special Issue has aimed at analyzing, from different point of views, the impact of Social Media and social interaction tools on the TV/video consumption area. The targeted topics of this Special Issue and a general overview of the accepted articles are provided in this Guest Editoria