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With Winter Olympics in VR, our viewing experiences will take an immersive turn

The PyeongChang Winter Olympics will be first first event ever to be broadcast live in virtual reality.
When the Winter Olympics get underway in South Korea next month, the state of broadcast would have changed like never before. Chipmaker Intel is powering a new era in broadcast with its immersive media technology that give users the choice of angles and perspectives like never before.
The PyeongChang Winter Olympics will be first first event ever to be broadcast live in virtual reality. In fact, there will be 30 different events that will get their own VR telecasts. In the streams, users will be able to change the camera angle, change the perspective to that of the player or someone else on the field or even shift to a Birdseye view of the entire event. This choice is something broadcast technology has never been able to offer.
But the Olympics will just be the beginning. Intel is already working with the NFL to start offering more immersive content and choice for viewers when it comes to college games. There games are already being filmed with high-definition 180-degree and 360-degree cameras that pack all the data into Voxels — essentially pixels with three dimensional data including depth and volume.
Intel has also signed a deal with Paramount pictures to start exploratory projects in volumetric video. That is the next level, shooting movies with multiple angles and perspectives, again offering the option to viewer to choose the angle he wants or, even better, be part of the action himself. Intel Studios has already set up a facility in Los Angeles to create such content on an experimental basis. This largest VR stage in the world is expected to change story telling like never before.
This unparalleled immersive media hub features a 10,000-square-foot dome for the capture of volumetric video using Intel True View technology, earlier called FreeD video. Inside the dome a camera array captures height, width and depth data of all the action within a scene to produce voxels. This information creates a virtual environment in multi-perspective 3D that can provide true six degrees of freedom in AR/VR experiences
But then this also needs immense compute power as the camera array captures up to 1TB of data every 10 seconds. This is where Intel’s graphics powered workstations and servers come into play.
“The 2018 Winter Olympics will be the first ideation of what can be made possible with 5G, but the production type applications will be more in the 2020 summer Olympics,” Sandra Rivera, senior vice president and general manager of the Network Platforms Group at Intel Corporation, told indianexpress.com. She said these events will also bring unlimited commute to the venues delivering new experiences both for the attendees as well as those watching the game at home.
The author is attending CES 2018 in Las Vegas at the invite of Intel. 

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