Synchronised Video Textures
Motivation
There does not seem to be any mechanism for shared watching of videos in VR that is easy to use. The problem seems to be related to a number of technical challenges as well as business challenges. The platform already supports video textures using the proprietary .roq file format. The platform will soon support asset bundles that can be downloaded and cached with expiry on clients. VR integration is planned for the future.
There are a limited number of actions that would be required to support video watching in game.:
- The ability to synchronise video position between players. This would likely involve entity that is synchronised across clients.
- The addition of alternative input video formats. This may be via adopting a library such as
FFmpegbut it is unclear on the performance impact or license compatibility. - The addition of entities in game to control the playback coordination between players. i.e. Shoot a button to start a video?
- The ability for a player to upload a video as an asset bundle.
It is unclear on the long term usability of this change, but it would be an interesting technical feat that would garner an immediate use.
Challenges
The FFmpeg library is notoriously difficult to get building within Bazel. It is also a significantly large code size with an unknown impact on code size and general performance. Some hardware has dedicated decoding units that should be used when available.
Solution
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Evaluation
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Future Work
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