Delaware Patent of the Month – February 2021

Virtual Reality (VR), while still new, is being incorporated in every field from healthcare to entertainment. VR enhances the experience by creating a feeling of ‘being there’ using interactions based around posture, eye gaze, voice and so on. Some uses are even incorporating haptic feedback to engage physical sensations. Processing the video data for virtual reality usually requires 360-degree camera footage which is stitched together. Vid Scale, Inc. has been working on a method to code 360-degree videos using geometry positioning.

A frame-packed image is created by stitching the frames from multiple videos together. To do so, a sample location is identified in an image and associated with a projection geometry. Projection geometry comes in many forms, but some common versions include cubemap projection, equal-area projection, and cylinder projection. A neighboring sample location might be outside the content boundary of the pictures. In that case, a padding sample location would be derived using the initial projection geometry. A sample location within the content boundaries does not need padding, and can be used as itself. This is continued across all collected images. This allows the images to be stitched together and any missing visual data can be derived using the other data. This method allows for the coding of 360-degree videos for virtual reality.

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