Japan developed the world’s first 5G-based 8K VR video playback system

NTT DOCOMO announced that it has developed the world’s first 5G-based 8K virtual reality live broadcast system. 

The system will be on display at the DOCOMO Valley 5G Open Lab in Tokyo, providing a highly realistic viewing experience with head-mounted displays.

To overcome the difficulty of 360-degree video real-time splicing and compression processing, DOCOMO uses field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for superior processing speed and high-density algorithms of up to 30 frames per second.

The device mixes 5 channels of 4K video from a fisheye camera in real time to a head-mounted display that clips the video into multiple clips that display the video corresponding to the direction the user is facing. A real-time encoder is used to generate the video sent to the display.

System Configuration docomo 8K VR

The system is designed to take full advantage of the ultra-high speed of 5G, which requires up to 200Mbps throughput to transfer video from the real-time encoder to the controller that configures the panoramic engine GPU and requires 80Mbps throughput to transfer video from the distribution server to the headset…

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