In the past year, VR live start-up company NextVR often appeared in the headlines of the media. They signed live broadcast agreements with many major events and events, and they also won the favor of many capitals. At the beginning of the month, NextVR won an investment of 80 million U.S. dollars from China NetEase and CITIC Guoan, and set its sights on the rapidly growing Asian market for VR content. NextVR continues to expand the global market. They have previously announced that they will cooperate with Fox Sports and will broadcast the Bundesliga opening ceremony of the 2016-2017 season in VR.
But few people will notice that NextVR is quietly creating a patent portfolio for 360-degree video decoding, live streaming, and playback. Last week, NextVR's six new patent applications were approved. According to FieldOf Division’s follow-up survey on the FPO (patent search website), NextVR has 32 patents and patent applications worldwide (compared with the number of Oculus's 42).
Patent obtained by NextVR
Most of NextVR's patent applications published on August 18 are directed to methods and devices that use "selectively reduce image resolution for transmission and/or for playback of devices." These patents appear to include methods and apparatus for downsampling video content using texture mapping and mesh formats prior to presenting the image in a head mounted display. As the patent description explains, "reducing the resolution in the image that is not easily viewable, while maintaining the part of the image that corresponds to the environment that can be viewed, can effectively use limited streaming image data to the playback device. bandwidth."
Downsampling video is not a new technology. NextVR's innovations seem to be related to the use of textures (or "UV mapping"; "UV Maps"). Textures are stored on the server and sent to the front of the image data. )user. The patent description shows that "the combination of multiple UV maps that selectively reduce the resolution of the image can be used to assign different resolutions to different parts of the image depending on how important a particular part of the image is at a given time." There is another interesting point, the patent description is this: "Because the number of pixels in the image does not change when the UV Map controls the allocation of pixels, the image transfer rate can remain relatively constant."