Volumetric Video Grapples with Latency; Apple, Tencent Back Proprietary Solutions
The article discusses the significant challenges and optimization techniques for volumetric video encoding to achieve low-latency streaming. It highlights the growing market demand across various industries and details existing solutions from key players like Apple and Tencent, focusing on their technical approaches and the underlying infrastructure requirements and quality assessment standards. The piece underscores the technical advancements and ongoing developments in this evolving market segment.
Key Takeaways
- Volumetric content data rates range from 50 Mbps to 1 Gbps, necessitating robust network infrastructure with sustained speeds of 100-300 Mbps for consumer use and dedicated fiber for professional applications.
- Achieving sub-100 millisecond end-to-end latency for interactive volumetric applications is a primary technical objective, requiring high frame rates (60 FPS or higher).
- Current encoding predominantly uses point cloud compression (MPEG V-PCC, G-PCC), with hardware acceleration and cloud-based systems distributing workloads.
- Apple's solution uses HEVC-based compression with custom silicon for hardware acceleration, while Tencent focuses on cloud-native solutions for gaming and social media.
- Quality assessment lacks standardization, relying on objective geometric distortion measurements and subjective perceptual studies for VR/AR experiences.
Why It Matters
The high bandwidth and low-latency demands of volumetric video are driving specialized infrastructure and encoding solutions, creating a fragmented ecosystem. This reliance on proprietary approaches by major players could hinder broader adoption and interoperability, impacting developers and smaller content creators. Watch for industry-wide standardization efforts and the emergence of more open-source tools to simplify volumetric video workflows and expand its market reach beyond enterprise and proprietary platforms.
Additional Context
Recent research continues to address the significant hurdles in volumetric video streaming. Brown University computer scientists, in May 2026, introduced PackUV, a new method that compresses 3D video data into standard 2D video formats. This aims to make volumetric content streamable on existing infrastructure, sidestepping some bandwidth issues (per Brown University, May 2026). Addressing packet loss, a key challenge for real-time interactive volumetric video, researchers are developing systems like ReVo. This cross-layer system, detailed in an April 2026 pre-print, combines selective network-layer protection with neural recovery to improve visual quality and reduce freezes by up to 95.7% in videoconferencing scenarios (per arXiv, April 2026). Another April 2026 pre-print introduced LEAN-3D, a point cloud codec designed for mobile devices. It aims to reduce latency by 3-5x and energy consumption by up to 5.1x on edge hardware, making learned compression more viable for real-time mobile 3D streaming (per Pith.science, April 2026). Furthermore, a May 2026 pre-print from arXiv presented CATRF, a framework that trains radiance fields using standard codecs like VP9, HEVC, or AV1. This approach achieves better rate-distortion trade-offs and outperforms existing methods in compression efficiency and decoding speed for low-bitrate, compression-resilient volumetric streaming (per arXiv, May 2026). New systems like DeltaStream, presented at MobiSys25, leverage 2D information to efficiently encode 3D point clouds, reducing volumetric video bandwidth by up to 71% with faster decoding, enabling stable 30 FPS streaming (per netstech.org, October 2025).
Read full article at eureka.patsnap.com
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