On October 16th and 17th, the consortium members of VR Together met for the fist time at the headquarters of the i2CAT Foundation, in Barcelona.

VR Together is a media project funded by the European Commission as part of the H2020 program, under the grant agreement 762111. It will last for 3 years (2017-2020) and operate with a budget of 3.9M€.

We aim at radically improving the experience by innovating in how media formats are used (i.e., how audio, video and graphics are captured, delivered and rendered at users’ homes) demonstrating a significant improvement of the feeling of being there together and the photorealistic quality of the content.

VRTogether’s consortium has been strategically set up to consist of partners that cover all stages of the production chain in a well-balanced way. A combination of leading academic institutions (i2CAT -Project Coordinator & Technical Lead-, CWI, CERTH and Artanim) and industry actors (Future Lighthouse, Entropy, Motion Spell and Viacess-Orca) that spread over 5 European countries.

Main objectives

• Develop and integrate new media formats that deliver high quality photo-realistic content and create a strong feeling of co-presence in coherently integrated experiences.
• Adapt the existing production pipeline to capture and encode multiple media formats and integrate them with state-of-the-art post-production tools.
• Re-Design the distribution chain so such innovative content format can be orchestrated and delivered in a scalable manner.
• Develop appropriate Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics and evaluation methods to quantify the quality of these new social VR experiences.
• Maximize the impact of VR-Together can have on content creators, producers, distributors, tooling companies, service providers and the general audience.

Milestones

• Intimate Concert

Offline pilot to demonstrate that the innovative media format of VR-Together (orchestrating point clouds, 3DMesh based models and multiple video sources) can produce a more intimate and binding activity.

• Live news

Live production of multi-source immersive content that takes the user to the location where news occurs while sharing it with other people.

• Interactive Fiction

Pilot to demonstrate how the VR-Together platform, in a custom-designed content production process, can allow for a novel form of content where users meet, and blend within the interactive immersive experience.

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