LiveSphere: 360-Degree Immersive Broadcast Video Platform
“The part that attracts most attention is how the picture stitching is done, but the part that enables us to build a business out of this technology is the efficient means of compressing the entire video sphere and the ability to match it to the best decoding capability of the smartphone or tablet to render the best results,” said Benoit Fouchard, chief strategy officer for ATEME.
“There are no solutions in existence that match the needs of the broadcast market,” he explained. “We don’t intend to offer this as a service model but as an end-to-end solution that puts these tools in the hands of the same production team producing the HD or Ultra HD main feed.”
Interestingly, he also downplayed the virtual reality angle: “We don’t want to give the impression that 360-degree video is just for VR where you have to wear headsets, because this is the issue that proved problematic for the public perception of 3D.”
During the Roland-Garros tests, a rig comprised of seven HD GoPro cameras was used from different positions. The best images were captured closer to the action. A multi-camera approach may not be a permanent solution, but Fouchard noted that, “single camera panoramic video doesn’t work for broadcast.”
While the system stitches multiple streams together with an output of less than HD, the goal is to achieve similar results in 4K and 8K.
See the full story here: http://www.etcentric.org/livesphere-360-degree-immersive-broadcast-video-platform/
and here http://www.tvbeurope.com/360o-video-tested-roland-garros/