Volumetric video represents 3D objects and scenes as point clouds or mesh-based data, so viewers can move freely around the content rather than watching from a fixed camera angle. 5G-MAG's work is built on MPEG V3C (Visual Volumetric Video-based Coding, ISO/IEC 23090-5), the framework that defines the container and compression for volumetric content. Two profiles build on it: V-PCC (Video-based Point Cloud Compression) and MIV (MPEG Immersive Video).
The MPEG V3C Immersive Platform reference tools provide an end-to-end pipeline for encoding, streaming, and rendering V3C content over 5G networks. The related Beyond 2D Video Experiences work extends this to evaluation frameworks for next-generation visual experiences (stereoscopic, multi-view, depth and point-cloud formats) — closely related to V3C but tracked as its own topic.
The Problem It Solves
Volumetric content (point clouds, multi-view-plus-depth) has no dedicated hardware codec of its own, and building one is not practical on mobile-class devices. V3C sidesteps that entirely: it projects the 3D data onto 2D planes and hands the resulting component videos to an ordinary 2D video codec (HEVC, and in later editions VVC), reserving CPU/GPU work only for the atlas parsing and 3D reconstruction on top. That is what makes volumetric delivery practical today, and it is also why a V3C stream can reuse the same DASH packaging, CDN and player-provisioning machinery as conventional video, instead of needing a parallel delivery stack built from scratch.
Open Source, Built Together
Reference Tools for This Project
The real, running software for this technology — 5 repositories.
Also used by Content Delivery Protocols
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