Kandao Technology today announced a new upgrade to its VR live streaming software ‘Kandao Live’, featuring support for the world’s-first 8K VR live streaming in 3D. Together with its professional 8K 3D VR camera ‘Obsidian R’, and a VR headset from its partner Skyworth, Kandao provides an end-to-end (capturing, processing and playback) 8k Ultra High-Definition VR live solution to deliver a truly immersive experience for the 5G era.

This system will be demonstrated at IBC exhibition at Amsterdam, from September 13th – 18th.

Kandao also announced a recent investment from Foxconn Technology Group. The funding will be used by Kandao to further develop and explore applications of 8K imaging and computational photography in various scenarios.

8K VR capturing

The 8K Kandao Live system is designed to work with Kandao Obsidian, a professional VR camera equipped with 6 fisheye lenses that can capture 8K 3D 360-degree videos. Each lens outputs a 11.4 Mega pixels video stream, and a total of 68.4 Mega pixels are then processed in real time to produce the 8K 3D 360 live stream. The full-quality unstitched footages can be saved at the same time when broadcasting in 8K, allowing producers to further polish and edit the content afterward.

8K VR processing

Processing 8K VR video in real time requires immense computational power. By optimizing the whole decoding, stitching and encoding pipeline, Kandao can significantly lowers the hardware requirement of the processing computer, making it possible to use a local PC to handle all the 8K workload in real time. By achieving this, Kandao Live supports not only 4K 2D or 4K 3D 360-degree streaming at 30 fps, but up to 8K resolution as well, in both 2D and 3D formats.

“Streaming 8K VR video also demands higher bandwidth, so we think 5G is an important development in this regard,” said Dan Chen, Kandao’s Founder and CEO. “But before 5G actually arrives, to optimize the processing system is fundamental to make us ready for this new technology.” Kandao will integrate the optimized stitching algorithm into not only Kandao Live, but also Kandao Studio, the company’s offline VR processing software, promising a significant speed boost to its stitching and depth-map generation.

8K VR playback

As most VR headsets and smartphones only support up to 4K decoding, in the past content producers usually have to make sacrifice and reduce the content resolution even when the sources are in 8K. By partnering with the well-known Chinese television manufacturer Skyworth and integrating its newly announced VR headset into the system, the Kandao Live system can play back 8K content directly by utilizing the headset’s 8k hardware decoding capability, vastly reducing the complexity of 8K content delivery and viewing.

With this, the stitched 8K videos processed by Kandao Live can be streamed to TV broadcasting system via SDI, or be transmitted on local network to the head-mounted VR display, to play the live videos at the full 8K quality.

“We are delighted to see the rapid development of 8K technology this year,” said Dan Chen, CEO and founder of Kandao, “At the beginning of 2018, I did not think that it is possible to decode 8K directly on a headset this year, neither we can transmit the whole 68.4 Mega pixels video stream from our camera over 5G network this year. . Yet things are happening way faster than we expected and we did all these with our partners. “

Kandao is committed to make contributions on the capturing and processing part of this ultra-high definition medium. Supported by the investment from Foxconn this time, Kandao will continue to explore the possibility of 8K imaging and computational photography.

To learn more about Kandao (prd.kandaovr.com)

Kandao Obsidian 8K 3D VR camera ( prd.kandaovr.com/en/Obsidian/#/overview)

Kandao Live (prd.kandaovr.com/en/live/)

Kandao@IBC
Date: Sep 14 – Sep 18
Hall 10 C25, Amsterdam RAI Exhibition and Congress Centre