Valve figures out way to stream 360-degree 8K-10K video with same bandwidth as Full HD

At the Steam Dev Days event, Valve teased a new video streaming technology that promises to make it possible to stream 360-degree VR content without pushing bandwidth consumption to new heights.

Developed in cooperation with video streaming service Pixvana and content delivery network Akamai, the technology uses adaptive bitrates to dynamically lower the quality of the video stream for angles you're not currently looking at. This trick creates the illusion that you're watching content with a 10K resolution, while consuming only about as much bandwidth as 1080p HD video.

The technique could prove useful for streaming virtual reality games. Full details at TweakTown.

Road to VR continues: "Turn your head to look at a segment and the bitrate is upped to deliver a much higher quality image. This is how the technology achieves the "10k over 1080p bandwidth" claim - and it's an interesting approach, one which Facebook and others are exploring too". The new system is called FOVAS, or Field of View Adaptive Streaming, and was created by Pixvana and used in their Open Projection Format, which is capable of delivering up to 10K resolution using adaptive streaming techniques in existing video compression standards like AVC and H.264.