Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitcurious | Hacker News Reader

I’m very excited about high fidelity VR entertainment. A documentary about insects at the scale of insects, looking around at grass or car sized grasshoppers, or giant mushrooms! It’s going to be amazing. Great for theater, ballet, sports, anything else where the real world equivalent has you looking around.

View on HN

I think that would be great, but my concern is bitrate.

When I’ve seen 3-D videos demoed on a Quest they were kind of interesting but the macro-block video artifacts were quite noticeable. You need to show two very high resolution images at (ideally) a high frame rate.

That leads to massive file sizes.

We thought the same thing about 1080p video back in the day.

With gigabit Internet you can stream very high quality VR content that looks really good. You just have to pay to actually get the good quality VR, or download it.

I’d imagine it’s mostly expensive to the servers more so than a technical limitation. YouTube would go under if they were streaming 60GB vr videos to every person.

Sure it’s no issue with gigabit. But there are a TON of people in the US who might not be able to get a fast enough connection for high quality streaming.

YouTube runs one of, if not, the best CDNs in the world. The World Cup doesn't phase them. Doing that kind of bandwidth regularly instead of for a special event just means they'll be buying more hardware sooner, rather than later.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com