Toward 3D-IPTV: design and implementation of a stereoscopic and multiple-perspective video streaming system

3D-Video systems allow a user to perceive depth in the viewed scene and to display the scene from arbitrary viewpoints interactively and on-demand. This paper presents a prototype implementation of a 3D-video streaming system using an IP network. The architecture of our streaming system is layered, where each information layer conveys a single coded video signal or coded scene-description data. We demonstrate the benefits of a layered architecture with two examples: (a) stereoscopic video streaming, (b) monoscopic video streaming with remote multiple-perspective rendering. Our implementation experiments confirm that prototyping 3D-video streaming systems is possible with today's software and hardware. Furthermore, our current operational prototype demonstrates that highly heterogeneous clients can coexist in the system, ranging from auto-stereoscopic 3D displays to resource-constrained mobile devices