Fraunhofer shows Lightfield, Audio and VR at NAB
April 2016 – Fraunhofer Research was showing off multiple projects and research results. The highlight areas were progress in their lightfield processing to support motion pictures rather than stils, the VR Omnicam system for either 360 video or VR applications, and their spatial surround sound audio.
At the show they released the production version of the lightfield plugin. This version supports both HD and UHD content. The plug in supports HDR if the original capture was made with the extended color depth. The plugin is frame rate independent and has a synchronizer to pre-process the content for the final frame creation. The new code uses both multi-CPU and multi-GPU platforms for the compute. A sample video clip from the first lightfield movie built with the plugin was shown at the show.
They also were showing a digital camera IMF setup for export from Final Cut Pro V10. They are finalizing the version of the export setup for Adobe.
Fraunhofer VR Omnicam 360 Capture system and new VR software
Beyond lightfield, they were showing 360 degree capture for surround vision and VR applications. The new VR Omnicam system supports HD at a resolution of 10,000×2000 at up to 60fps. The system can perform 2D or 3D capture in the 360degree for live streaming and capture for post processing. A limitation on the environment is the storage space required for local capture. The system uses 10TB at 25 fps for short duration capture. In order to alleviate this limitation, the system now supports a 1GB or 10GB fiber connections to a high capacity SAN.
In addition to video and image processing, they were showing their audio solutions. Most VR applications have challenges with the positional sound moving with the focus of the video. The new SDK not only allows for multi-channel sound processing, but allows for full spatial sound placement in 160degree vertically and 360 degree laterally. The sound is not only positional but also volumetricly filling a block of space. The SDK works with 360 VR system from Samsung, LG and Google.
