Authoring Tool for Immersive Content Leveraging Cloud-based Rendering System: Toward Virtuous Cycle between Viewing and Creating Content
Shuichi Aoki, Yasutaka Matsuo · 2025
Immersive media is an advanced form of applications such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and eXtended Reality (XR) that allows users to move freely in a video space and view images from any location. It is a 6-degrees-of-freedom (DoF) media in which users can feel as though they are actually in the video space. We are engaged in research on content formats for immersive media and cloud-based rendering systems to achieve immersive media that can be viewed on various types of devices. In this paper, we present an authoring tool we developed to leverage a rendering server on a cloud in order to create immersive content easily. The authoring tool, which makes use of a cloud-based rendering system that has been developed to view immersive content, enables users to arrange video objects including compressed volumetric video and 360-degree video in a three-dimensional space of content while checking images viewed from various positions and directions. It is also possible to configure a viewing area in which users can move around in the three-dimensional space and to record the recommended viewing position and direction. The produced scene description can be output in a streaming format. We confirmed that the immersive content consisting of scene description produced with the authoring tool can be viewed on a head-mounted display, tablet device, and PC with controller. When such a tool becomes widely used, it is expected to create a virtuous cycle between viewing and creating immersive content, leading to the spread of more content.