11 Feb – Want to feel really present? 12K stereo goes a long way!
I’ve often said that more quality is needed for a real and immersive feel – certainly we need to go beyond 4K. We believe that 8K VR360 is a great step in the right direction but sure, higher still would be nicer still. In fact, until we hit at least 16K per eye, bring on that extra resolution.
Now that we start getting 8K decoders in consumer devices, tiled streaming can serve 16K monoscopic content, and 12K stereoscopic clips. Just today I saw some amazing VR360 clips captured by Veer. They were displayed in a Skyworth headset in 10K and 12K, both monoscopic and stereoscopic. The clips were fairly random scenes captured somewhere in China, but that didn’t matter. The production of the clips was professional, and putting the headset on and playing the content got me that wow-effect again from back when I first saw 360VR. With such a high resolution it really starts to feel like you are there.
This all illustrates two important points:
- VR360 holds a lot of promise, and one day sooner rather than later it will be really feel like real. For that to happen, the ecosystem needs to grow further: better cameras, better headsets, more powerful chipsets, higher-capacity networks.
- And this is exactly what is happening, as we speak. All of it. Examples include the Qualcomms XR2 platform, the Samsung Galaxy S10 with its 8K decoder, Skyworth’s 8K headset (and Varjo’s XR-1, and Pimax’s 8K headsets, …), cameras from Focal Point VR, Kandao, Insta360. And obviously our own ClearVR tiled end-to-end streaming solution allowing such insanely high-resolution to be streamed over existing network infrastructure, for live and on-demand content. I can list many more examples; this all just needs some time.
At Tiledmedia we are deploying our 4K and 8K solutions today, we are demonstrating 10K and 12K, and we are ready for the 16K+ future. Again:- bring it on!
– Rob
Author
Stay tuned!