55 VR FOCUS Sports
IN THE MIX BT Sport has done trials with 8K VR technology, including with streaming of the 2019 FA Cup
called tile-based media encoding. At the moment, the legacy way of working is we basically encode the whole of the rectangular 4K video for streaming. That’s quite inefficient, because you have to stream the whole 4K raster to the handset, but the viewer only sees the little tiny bit they’re looking at, at any given time. “Using the tile encoding, we basically break this up into chunks,“ he continues. “We only stream to the consumer the bit they’re looking at, at that time. If you’re looking straight ahead, we’re sending you the tile straight in front of you in very high resolution, and those surrounding you, and everything else is in the lowest possible bitrate. As you turn your head, we increase the bandwidth for that next tile you switch to, turning the bandwidth down for the original tile. “Basically, it means you can massively increase the resolution for the viewer,” he adds. “It also increases the bitrate, so it just completely transforms the experience. Another advantage of 8K is you can now pinch and zoom if you’re in Magic Window
mode, push in and get closer and have a look at players or anything else.” BT Sport has done several trials with the technology, including streaming the 2019 FA Cup at Wembley in 8K VR. Custom-built VR camera rigs, making use of Blackmagic Design Micro Studio 8K cameras – as well as Tiledmedia’s Tiled VR streaming technology, ClearVR – were used in the trial that streamed VR to a select number of handsets, vision-mixed with commentary. “For the 8K workflows all those cameras need to be stitched, so every camera has an associated high-powered PC with Blackmagic DeckLink capture cards for stitching the 8K video,” says Beale. “That’s a lot of data to crunch in real time, so we’re using the new 8K ATEM Constellation from Blackmagic as the switcher, and we’re also using Blackmagic HyperDeck to record the signal for archive.” As well as the amount of data involved, the idea of an 8K VR stream reacting to user input raises the question of latency. “It does add a little bit of latency, but actually the encoding is very good,” counters Beale. “I was pretty sceptical at first, and thought if you moved your head too much it wouldn’t work. But it’s really surprised me how well it works, it’s very impressive. It’s going to game change the whole VR landscape when it comes along in the next 12 months.”
THE BOXING IS INCREDIBLE IN VR BECAUSE IT’S SO UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL, VERY IMMERSIVE
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