Suometry wants to revolutionize enterprise VR video communication

I got in touch with an interesting Canadian company called Suometry that works in the VR video communication sector. They’re cool people that have also exhibited their product at CES 2018 and received great feedback. I’ve been able to test their product myself and I found that it is quite cool, so I want to talk you a bit about it.

It all started when Sam from Suometry contacted me on Linkedin to talk about his company’s “social VR” platform. I thought that it was just another social VR environment (like Anyland or Bigscreen VR) but tailored for enterprise usage. The world is becoming saturated with social VR frameworks and I was not enthusiastic by the idea of visiting another one, but I agreed to give it a shot anyway.

When I got the link to communicate with him, I discovered that the platform, called ConVRsation, is completely different from what I thought about. It is not a virtual social world, it is a video streaming solution. I was a bit puzzled by this unexpected difference… maybe I should have asked some more questions before accepting the invitation!

So, just by pasting a website link on my Firefox browser, I was able to see the 360 streaming of Sam inside my Oculus Rift headset. After some talking on Linkedin messaging with him, I was able to finally see the true face of Sam from his office in Montreal.

The streaming was very smooth and worked perfectly both on my Oculus Rift and inside my Cardboard. And thanks to WebVR I was able to live stream it without installing a single software on my PC. Awesome… I felt like I was using the Skype of VR. It was a kind of “social VR”, but not the one that we always refer with this term: this is a “video social VR”, or better a “VR video communication platform”.

At some point, Sam asked me: “can you see the stitching points of the video?”. And I (rotating my head): “mmmh… no… I can’t view them. Are there stitching points?”. So he said me “There’s one here next to my shoulder, can you see it?”. No, I wasn’t able to spot it in any way. That video was just awesomely stitched. Sam explained to me that the video was made using the data of 3 cameras, but I wasn’t able to see any stitching point at all. I couldn’t get where were the borders of the images of any of the cameras. Great job, Suometry… great job.

So, thanks to ConVRsation, I’ve been able to have a high-quality video communication in VR with a person that lived on the other side of the world. Not bad. I got curious and I started asking Sam some more questions about his product.

He told me that the Suometry solution is both hardware and software. On the hardware side, they have 3 high-quality cameras that are arranged in a particular (patented) configuration called omnipolar. On the software side, they have a fantastic stitching and streaming technology that is very very fast. Then they have the communication platform, that is ConVRsation, that exploits all of this to make people communicate in VR through video.

Currently, the hardware and software solutions are highly interwoven and can’t be used separately, but Suometry plans to make them more modular and detachable so that its interesting software can be used with different types of cameras. On its plans, there is also, of course, the evolution of the hardware and the software it offers, but also the ambition of becoming a standard in the 360 videos real-time streaming solutions. ConVRsation should allow up to 10 people to communicate simultaneously and become really like a Skype VR for the enterprise sector.

Coming back to current features, what makes Suometry innovative with regard to the competition is mainly:

• Its lower price, because it just needs 3 cameras. Of course, we’re talking about professional cameras for enterprise usages, not of the Samsung Gear 360. So when we talk about cheap solutions, we’re still talking about thousands of dollars;
• Its real-time stitching and streaming process. It doesn’t need hours of post-processing like other famous cameras (e.g. Google Jump), it just stitches and streams in real-time… this means that it can be used for communications (like in ConVRsation) or to stream events (as sports events, concerts, etc…).

This is huge. If you need some more technical specifications for this solution:

Sensors: 1/1.8 inch Sony Exmor CMOS image sensor
Total pixel resolution: 3 x 3088(H)×2076(V) @ 60fps
Effective output resolution: 4k x 2k / eye @ 60 fps
Imaging type: Omnipolar configuration
Viewing angle: Horizontal: 360° Vertical: 260°
Real-time stitching delay: Less than 0.02s
Video encoding format: Flexible (RAW, H.264, VP9)

But how do they manage to obtain such great results with stitching? The delay is reaaaally little! As Sam has told me

We leverage the power of modern GPU chips and apply cutting edge stereo vision algorithms to reconstruct the 3D scene and stitch the frames. This process is greatly accelerated by our hardware configuration, which allows us to assume prior knowledge of the geometry, which prunes the depth estimation process down to a simple and robust linear search

then, talking about his company, he also added

The core of our capabilities is our patented omni stereo geometry. This geometry enables us to turn a non-deterministic 3-dimensional problem (stitching together the stereoscopic video streams) into a deterministic 2 dimensional solution. We simplify virtual reality capture by stitching in faster than the blink of an eye. ConVRsation, the social streaming platform, is an offshoot of how fast we manage to stitch and stream by controlling the entire pipeline from glass to glass. The current beta demo is based on webVR + webRTC protocols and operates entirely over the internet (OTT).

I also tried asking him about the current customers they have, but he answered me that he couldn’t reveal me their names.

What I loved of talking with Sam is that he’s also a VR believer

I think some of the press got carried away with the “Trough of Disillusionment” in VR’s hype curve. In fact, according to Tipatat Chennavasin, “global investment in VR and AR is tracking higher than any previous period, and at a more accelerated pace” in 2017. Furthermore, VR has already proven its place and value in more niche applications like real-estate, adult entertainment, education and enterprise… Also, secondly, we do not carry “VR” in our name because we are fundamentally a computer-vision technology company building the fastest stereoscopic 360 cameras – thus enabling new killer applications for VR, like social VR, and also, other non-VR use cases like ADAS.

and we all believe in this technology as him.

I enjoyed my time testing the Suometry solution, even if I’m not a video streaming expert (maybe Alex from SLR would have appreciated it even more!), and I think that it can have a lot of interesting applications. The absence of a visible stitching and the use of WebVR technology are the features that I loved the most. Of course, it is a bit too early to dream about a Skype VR, since this solution, even if it is cheaper if compared with the other ones on the market, it is still too expensive for the general consumer. If you have a company that may be interested in such a solution, go to the Suometry website and discover it. The rest of us will have still to wait a bit to use Skype VR in our everyday lives…

(Header image by Suometry)