Foveated streaming of virtual reality videos

While Virtual Reality (VR) represents a revolution in the user experience, current VR systems are flawed on different aspects. The difficulty to focus naturally in current headsets incurs visual discomfort and cognitive overload, while high-end headsets require tethered powerful hardware for scene synthesis. One of the major solutions envisioned to address these problems is foveated rendering. We consider the problem of streaming stored 360° videos to a VR headset equipped with eye-tracking and foveated rendering capabilities. Our end research goal is to make high-performing foveated streaming systems allowing the playback buffer to build up to absorb the network variations, which is permitted in none of the current proposals. We present our foveated streaming prototype based on the FOVE, one of the first commercially available headsets with an integrated eye-tracker. We build on the FOVE's Unity API to design a gaze-adaptive streaming system using one low- and one high-resolution segment from which the foveal region is cropped with per-frame filters. The low- and high-resolution frames are then merged at the client to approach the natural focusing process.