An end-to-end system for the production and delivery of photorealistic and social virtual reality experiences

VR-Together will offer new ground-breaking virtual reality experiences based on social photorealistic immersive content, which can be experienced together with friends, and demonstrate its use for domestic VR consumption. For this purpose, it will develop and assemble an end-to-end pipeline integrating state-of-the-art technologies and off-the-shelf components. Immersive media production and delivery will be achieved through innovative capture, encoding, delivery and rendering technologies.

The challenge of VR-Together is to create photorealistic truly social virtual reality experiences in a cost-effective manner. VR social experiences will be delivered by the orchestration of innovative media formats (video, a blend of videos, point cloud representations and 3D mesh interpolation). The production and delivery of such experiences will be demonstrated and analysed through dedicated real-world trials.

Furthermore, the scalability of its approach for production and delivery of immersive content will be demonstrated as well, where such content will be consumed using off-the-shelf (OTS) hardware components and scalable cloud services (i.e. large community of users, in everyday living rooms, using OTS equipment).

Finally, it will introduce new methods for social VR evaluation and quantitative platform benchmarking for both live and interactive content production, thus providing production and delivery solutions with significant commercial value.