Scaling virtual camera services to a large number of users

By processing video footage from a camera array, one can easily make wide-field-of-view panorama videos. From the single panorama video, one can further generate multiple virtual cameras supporting personalized views to a large number of users based on only the few physical cameras in the array. However, giving personalized services to large numbers of users potentially introduces both bandwidth and processing bottlenecks, depending on where the virtual camera is processed. In this demonstration, we present a system that address the large cost of transmitting entire panorama video to the end-user where the user creates the virtual views on the client device. Our approach is to divide the panorama into tiles, each encoded in multiple qualities. Then, the panorama video tiles are retrieved by the client in a quality (and thus bit rate) depending on where the virtual camera is pointing, i.e., the video quality of the tile changes dynamically according to the user interaction. Our initial experiments indicate that there is a large potential of saving bandwidth on the cost of trading quality of in areas of the panorama frame not used for the extraction of the virtual view.