ipromotion: A cloud-based platform for virtual reality internet advertising

Abstract

We present a large-scale platform for distributing Virtual Reality advertisements over theWorldWideWeb. The platform aims at receiving and transmitting large amounts of data overmobile and desktop devices in SmartCity contexts, is based on a modular and distributed architecture to allow for scalability, and incorporates content-based search capabilities for Virtual Reality (VR) scenes to allow for content management. Data is stored on a cloud repository, to allow for a large amount of VR material to be kept and distributed, and follows a service-based approach of independent subsystems for the management, conversion and streaming of information. In order to function over a wide range of used end-devices, from mobile phones to high-end desktop PCs, the system is based on HTML5 technologies, and implements a remote rendering server to alleviate the computational burden on the end device. Furthermore, an extension of the MPEG-7 standard is used for the description and retrieval of 3D scenes from the cloud, and we have further ensured compliance of our system with a number of other structure and communication standards, to ensure extensibility and reusability of the sub-modules. The platform is a research work in progress: we present the subsystems already implemented, plan our next steps and describe our contributions to research.