Focal Point VR Depth Enhanced Video Technology

Описание: Focal Point VR is a Virtual Reality video technology startup, based in Guildford, England, and founded by proven entrepreneurs and technologists (pause) driving a revolution in video technology as it moves to embrace the potential of Virtual and Augmented Realities.

Established at the start of 2016, we have developed a GPU driven camera to headset broadcast quality live stream 360 video platform. Our technology powered the 360 coverage of the Samsung S8 launch event featuring Royal Blood in April this year. This was watched by over 100,000 people live and then on demand by over 9 million people.

We believe that VR video will be the next platform for experiencing live events. VR will allow millions of paying fans to remotely sit in the best seats at events that they are passionate about but can't attend. However to deliver an experience people will pay for, the technology has to deliver a step change in quality.

Putting on a Virtual reality headset transports the viewer, making them really believe that they are somewhere else – this is called ‘presence’. Computer generated VR achieves this by dynamically rendering a new scene for each eye from an untethered virtual camera matched to the position and rotation of the viewer’s head and eyes. This gives a true-stereo sense of immersion in these artificial scenes.

Today's 360 degree video surrounds you with imagery. You can rotate your viewpoint freely but it doesn’t create any sense of place in three dimensions.

It’s an interesting first step but fails to create a feeling of presence that convinces viewers that they’re somewhere else in the real world. This scene is being displayed using a traditional mono 360 video player.

By adding depth, we upgrade 360 video to deliver the same sense of presence previously only achieved in computer generated scenes. Here we can see the depth map we have extracted from the scene.

Going back to the 360 video, we can turn on our depth enhanced rendering, which un-tethers the viewpoint, allowing the viewer not only to rotate their head but to move side to side and up & down creating parallax.

Extracting depth from disparity, light field cameras or active sensors we will stream colour plus depth and reconstruct true stereo imagery on the player. Here you can see the holes created where elements of the scene are hidden from a fixed point of view 360 camera. As the viewer moves their head the holes get larger.

Using our reconstruction technology, adding depth layers to the video and using dynamic in-painting, we fill in those gaps and free the viewer's head.

We will be able to deliver a true stereo, untethered video stream with a vastly better feeling of immersion in a camera based, real world stream as opposed to a CGI scene.

In the future, flat 2D videos will appear as old-fashioned as black and white films do today. We’re bringing a new dimension to the moving image; immersing the viewer in the heart of the action.

Focal Point VR is at the forefront of this radical technology shift in video.