[reggieband]

Maybe a bit in the weeds on the technical side ... but any reason you went with HLS vs. dash? I spent a good few years streaming video (2d) and my personal preference was HLS (mostly due to the intransigence of Apple and thereby its ubiquity) but a lot of people on the cutting edge of that field were hyping up dash. Was that a technical decision? I mean, I know of ways to support both in regular video (excepting the schism in DRM technologies) so I assume it must be technically possible to do it in 3d.

Also, just an FYI but Meta (nee Facebook) is doing the hard-press on LinkedIn for engineers with streaming experience specifically looking for AR/VR video streaming. How do you fit into that eco-system? Video is powerful because it is everywhere ... on Reddit, in my Facebook feed, on Instagram not to mention YouTube. It took a while for that to happen - but is there an on-ramp to similar services in your roadmap?

I've played a bit with 3d video, even bought a VR 180 camera. You mention one deficiency of VR 360 you sought to solve was that it lacked in degrees of freedom. My own experience was that VR 180 was significantly more interesting. I honestly don't want to swivel my head around much when consuming content and VR 180 at least keeps the majority of the action right in front of me. It feels more appropriate in many ways for many purposes, including a Zoom like VR conferencing setup. I would assume it uses less data as well which seems like a win.

Finally, AR feels like such an interesting area in this space. Do your formats include any kind of objects/meshes/shaders/etc? Now that I think about it, I'm even more interested in 3d spacial audio. Do either of these figure into your offering?

[jillboyce]

We went with HLS instead of DASH because of easier iPhone integration, but we can certainly offer DASH support if there is sufficient customer demand. Our technical approach works just as well for DASH as for HLS.

Because our approach is built on existing video streaming protocols/servers and video codecs, we think it is a straightforward step to add 3D video streaming to existing 2D video streaming services. As you say, 2D video is everywhere now. We envision a future where 3D video also becomes ubiquitous.

With our system, 180 or 360 cameras can be used. It is up the creator to decide what range of volume to capture, what type of cameras, how many cameras, etc., which determines the range of motion is supported for the viewer.

It is on our roadmap to allow augmentation of real-world 3D video with objects/meshes like in AR, except instead of augmenting your current local scene, you can augment a remote scene (or remote in time scene).

Spatial audio would also be a very useful feature. We are video experts, not audio experts, so would plan to work with a partner to offer support for spatial audio in the future.

Thanks for your comments. It's great to hear what features people are most interested in.

[BSalahieh]

I love this discussion... I second Jill in every thing she said. Our solution makes it straight forward to support immmersive video using legacy video servers (current infrastructure and bandwidth limits). Besides, we already have support for perspective and equirectangular projections and we plan to add more whenver there requests from creators / customers. Supporting MIV / Kinect / iPhones captures are just the begining and we definetly are going to add support for other volumetric representations in the future.