RealVR: Efficient, Economical, and Quality-of- Experience-Driven VR Video System Based on MPEG OMAF

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the explosion of virtual reality (VR) videos and applications. This new form of media grants us the precious freedom we never had before to look at any directions of the video content. With such privilege, our desires for higher video resolution and frame-rate, better visual quality, and smoother watching experience have remarkably risen. However, VR videos occupy an astronomical amount of data, which poses unprecedented challenges to computation efficiency, deployment cost, and user experience of the system. In this paper, we propose RealVR, an end-to-end tile-based VR video system that faces and tackles such challenges. With all essential procedures from the initial capturing to the ultimate rendering included, the system is designed, implemented, and configured specifically to achieve the best balance among efficiency, economy, and quality-of-experience (QoE). It leverages the promising international VR standard, MPEG OMAF, to process and deliver 8 K 60 fps VR video, but is also improved for much better performance and user experience than the pristine standard, especially for reducing the motion-to-high-quality (MtHQ) latency. It does not rely on additional expensive edge servers to offer an immersive user experience, which makes it more economical than many other works. Through extensive experiments, it is proven that RealVR can significantly improve the MtHQ experience and save bandwidth consumption without compromising on encoding efficiency or application cost, maximizing the user‘s freedom.