New interactive strategies for virtual reality streaming in degraded context of use

Abstract

Virtual reality videos are an important element in the range of immersive contents as they open new perspectives for story-telling, journalism or education. Accessing these immersive contents through Internet streaming is however much more difficult owing to the required data rates much higher than for regular videos. While current streaming strategies rely on video compression, in this paper we investigate a radically new stance: we posit that degrading the visual quality is not the only choice to reduce the required data rate, and not necessarily the best. Instead, we propose two new impairments, Virtual Walls (VWs) and Slow Downs (SDs), that change the way the user can interact with the 360∘ video in an environment with insufficient available bandwidth. User experiments with a double-stimulus approach show that, when triggered in proper time periods, these impairments are better perceived than visual quality degradation from video compression. We confirm with network simulations the usefulness of these new types of impairments: incorporated into a FoV-based adaptation, they can enable reduction in stalls and startup delay, and increase quality in FoV, even in the presence of substantial playback buffers.