Facebook working on technologies that significantly shrink load times of VR and 360 videosMumbai, Jan 22(AZINS) In September last year, Facebook announced native support for 360-degree video, showcased spectacularly in this Star Wars planet run video. Support for this new and lucrative video consumption standard has helped the social media giant drive their daily video viewing from 1 billion views about a year and a half ago to the current 8 billion views per day--a massive jump by any standard.

To enable its users to consume videos more effectively and seamlessly, Facebook has been working on several advancements in video processing standards--advancements that will facilitate the demands that trends like virtual reality are expected to place on video consumption. After all, nothing kills a viewing experience more than having to wait for the video to buffer.

And buffering is precisely what Facebook’s new video encoding algorithms aims to reduce, even entirely eliminate. After all, they do own Oculus--the VR headset platform they are sure to push extensively once it becomes commercially available later this year.

The techniques they are working on is to do with the way in which video is encoded: the process that converts recorded information into a file that can be streamed. 360-degree videos create spherical video content, which is encoded by mapping the scenes from a typical equirectangular shape into a cube that conforms to Facebook’s specifications. This approach results in 360-degree video file sizes reducing by about 25 percent compared to earlier standards. They have even gone ahead and open sourced this encoding technique, enabling virtually any developer to have a go at further improving encoding efficiency.

In parallel, Facebook is also working on another more advanced video encoding approach that uses a process called pyramid encoding, which they claim can make virtual reality videos for headsets 80 percent smaller than what’s currently possible. This is a big stride, given that VR videos need to encoded at much higher frame rates and resolutions compared to general 360-degree videos that play back in your news feed.

Not just with the playback of video, Facebook is also working on technologies aimed at revolutionizing the way videos are discovered in the first place. They have in place a Vision Understanding team that is involved with finding ways for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to autonomously recognize individual voxels--video pixels.

This has huge implications--being able to effectively serve up relevant videos that users are more likely to enjoy (you like hiking? Here’s a 360-degree video of the best mountain trails near you,) that’s the Holy Grail of a video hosting platform: a platform that Facebook is increasingly becoming.