Qualcomm is working on VR application via streaming technology without video images

Scientists and Qualcomm are working on commercial exploitation of what the researchers describe as a new streaming technique for VR glasses. Data is streamed here; this requires less bandwidth and can lead to high-quality vr applications on cheap glasses.

According to Austrian researchers at Graz University of Technology, led by Professor Dieter Schmalstieg of the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision, it is a method that combines the advantages of cloud computing and VR. The scientists argue that server-side computation has the potential to take VR games to the next level, but bandwidth requirements are still a challenge. According to them, the use of traditional video transmission, in which a video stream is actually sent to the end user via an internet connection, is reaching its limits in VR applications.

They call their previously developed method shading atlas streaming, which according to the scientists has the potential to be a breakthrough for wireless VR applications, where the VR glasses are not attached via a wire to, for example, a PC that performs all the calculations. This method does not stream videos, just the visible geometry and some sort of overarching atlas containing the shading information. On the client side, i.e. through the VR glasses, that data is then combined. According to the researchers, this leads to a much lower required bandwidth, without sacrificing quality.

This system is also a solution for latency. According to Schmalstieg, it is physically impossible to remove all latency, but the researchers’ method makes it possible to predict correct images over a short future window of time. That means, according to Schmalstieg, the users will not experience any latency. To integrate their technology into existing infrastructure, conventional MPEG video compression is used to encode and transmit the data.