FISF: Better User Experience using Smaller Bandwidth for Panoramic Virtual Reality Video
This addresses bandwidth constraints for mobile VR video streaming to improve user experience, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing clustering and streaming techniques.
The paper tackles the challenge of transmitting panoramic VR videos with limited bandwidth while ensuring high-resolution and fluent views to prevent side-effects like dizziness, proposing a Focus-based Interactive Streaming Framework (FISF) that significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
The panoramic video is widely used to build virtual reality (VR) and is expected to be one of the next generation Killer-Apps. Transmitting panoramic VR videos is a challenging task because of two problems: 1) panoramic VR videos are typically much larger than normal videos but they need to be transmitted with limited bandwidth in mobile networks. 2) high-resolution and fluent views should be provided to guarantee a superior user experience and avoid side-effects such as dizziness and nausea. To address these two problems, we propose a novel interactive streaming technology, namely Focus-based Interactive Streaming Framework (FISF). FISF consists of three parts: 1) we use the classic clustering algorithm DBSCAN to analyze real user data for Video Focus Detection (VFD); 2) we propose a Focus-based Interactive Streaming Technology (FIST), including a static version and a dynamic version; 3) we propose two optimization methods: focus merging and prefetch strategy. Experimental results show that FISF significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. The paper is submitted to Sigcomm 2017, VR/AR Network on 31 Mar 2017 at 10:44:04am EDT.