V-SENSE PI Professor Smolic is co-PI of new funded project “SpheryStream”!

---

We are delighted to announce a new innovative consortium led by Dr. Laura Toni (UCL) as the Principal Investigator (PI), and V-SENSE PI Professor Smolic (TCD), as co-PI who have been successful in securing funding for SpheryStream!

SpheryStream aims to design virtual and augmented reality systems (VR at large) for real-world use cases such as healthcare, entertainment, e-education, and high-risk missions by developing a coding/streaming/rendering chain that places the interactive user at the very heart of the system.

SpheryStream aims to overcome the challenges in immersive technology by developing an efficient tool for navigation patterns analysis in the spherical domain and leverage on that to predict users’ behaviour and build the entire coding-delivery-rendering pipeline as a user- and geometry-centric system. This proposal focuses on develop novel VR delivery strategies, which will rely on the analysis and prediction of the navigation patterns of the omnidirectional content navigation, in a user, content- and application-dependent fashion. Predicting users’ behaviour will allow to delivery only the content that will be actually consumed by the users, minimising the transmission resources consumption while maximising the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE).

The key novelty will be to address the above challenges working directly on the spherical domain, rather than on the projected (thus deformed) bidimensional domain. The developed VR system will be tested via a real omnidirectional video streaming testbed that will be implemented within the scope of the project. The outcomes of the project will be three-folds: i) user- content- and application-dependent VR streaming platform, optimized from the source codec to the delivery platform; ii) users analysis tools able to assess users’ behaviour (when interactive with the content) in an objective fashion to identify common navigation patterns, and to predict future behaviours; iii) VR streaming testbed to test the proposed technology. 

Dr. Laura Toni is the Principal Investigator at LASP (Learning And Signal Processing) at the Electronic Engineering Department at University College London.

Professor Aljosa Smolic, PI V-SENSE Research Group, SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

SpheryStream Consortium composition:
– Dr. Laura Toni as the Principal Investigator (PI);
– Prof. Aljosa Smolic leading the V-Sense group at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) as co-PI;
and the following project partners:
– Prof. Pablo Cesar(Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica – CWI)who is a renowned expert in social virtual reality, and multimedia systems;
– Adobe Research San José, who developed next generation video technologies widely used in future video streaming systems, such as the Adobe’s HTTP Dynamic Streaming;
– the Immersive and Interactive Content research group at BBC Research, a team of about 20 engineers developing next-generation audio and video systems with strong interest in emerging technologies such as interactive contents and immersive TV;
– Huawei Technologies (Ireland), the world’s leading ICT solutions company with strong expertise on 5G, IoTs and computer vision.

“This work was supported by Science Foundation Ireland [20/EPSRC/3696] and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/T03324X/1].”