Volumetric Video Reconstruction and Communications: Toward a New Era of Interactive and Immersive Social Virtual Reality (VR)

Recent advances in volumetric video technologies are opening thedoor to new interactive and immersive experiences. This paperpresents novel technological enablers to provide realistic and vol-umetric reconstructions of real-world elements. On the one hand,novel Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) based methods are proposedto increase the quality of 3D scenes and objects reconstructions,with improved smoothness of the surfaces. On the other hand, areal-time volumetric video pipeline is proposed to overcome limita-tions in terms of visual quality and resources usage (bandwidth andprocessing) of state-of-the-art solutions adopted in the holographiccommunications domain. Preliminary results not only prove thebenefits of such enablers when compared to state-of-the-art solu-tions, but the potential of their joint integration to provide newcompelling and engaging interactive virtual experiences.