FISF: Better User Experience using Smaller Bandwidth for Panoramic Virtual Reality Video

TL;DR

This paper introduces FISF, an interactive streaming framework for panoramic VR videos that reduces bandwidth usage while maintaining high-quality, fluent views, enhancing user experience and addressing transmission challenges.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel Focus-based Interactive Streaming Framework (FISF) combining user data analysis, focus detection, and optimization strategies for efficient panoramic VR video streaming.

Findings

FISF significantly outperforms existing methods in bandwidth efficiency.

Focus-based strategies improve user experience in VR streaming.

Experimental results validate the effectiveness of FISF.

Abstract

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.