Towards Retina-Quality VR Video Streaming: 15ms Could Save You 80% of Your Bandwidth
This addresses bandwidth limitations for VR users, offering a significant improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of streaming high-quality VR video by showing that reducing motion-to-photon latency to under 15ms enables 5x better compression in gaze-contingent systems, saving 80% bandwidth.
Virtual reality systems today cannot yet stream immersive, retina-quality virtual reality video over a network. One of the greatest challenges to this goal is the sheer data rates required to transmit retina-quality video frames at high resolutions and frame rates. Recent work has leveraged the decay of visual acuity in human perception in novel gaze-contingent video compression techniques. In this paper, we show that reducing the motion-to-photon latency of a system itself is a key method for improving the compression ratio of gaze-contingent compression. Our key finding is that a client and streaming server system with sub-15ms latency can achieve 5x better compression than traditional techniques while also using simpler software algorithms than previous work.