Korea Telecom had an extreme VR set-up. Image:Meko
Korea Telecom (SK Telecom) had this Virtual Reality ‘experience’ which was provoking very strong responses from participants! The system rotated around and bumped while the users wear a VR headset. Also on the Korea Telecom technology area was a demo that showed how a multiple camera system, broadcast over 5G, could be used to provide detailed analysis of sports events using a ‘time slice’ concept. This is similar to the kind of technology being developed by Intel for sports events and shown at CES.
KT Time slice application for sports. Image:Meko
Korea Telecom also had a partner, which our notes identify as Salim, on the booth that was showing an interesting video application on VR glasses. Unfortunately, it was hard to get a good picture because of the headset use. The application was showing ‘360º VR Baseball’. The app showed a feed of a baseball match with 360º support. Also visible in the headset at the bottom of the image was a scoreboard. The headset included gaze tracking, so if the viewer held a steady gaze at the scoreboard, it was zoomed up to occupy more of the space with more data. At the ‘far side’ of the baseball ground was a ‘virtual LED display’. This showed up a close up view. Again, if the viewer gazed at the LED display, it zoomed up so that the close up view took up much more of the display. This was a very seamless and natural way to interact with a sports application. I must say that I could imagine watching a sports event this way.
Korea Telecom is committed to developing 360º VR and the solution shown used a combination of LTE and OTT content. At the moment, the app on the client device was combining the data from OTT and broadcast. However, the company told us, eventually the joining of the different content may be done in the cloud, although this would mean feeding back gaze data from the viewer.
