Vega: Fully Immersive Mobile Volumetric Video Streaming with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

For highly immersive mobile volumetric video streaming, it is essential to deliver photo-realistic full-scene content with smooth playback. Unlike traditional representations such as point clouds, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has gained attention for its ability to represent high-quality full-scene 3D content. However, our preliminary experiments show that existing methods for 3DGS-based videos fail to achieve smooth playback on mobile devices. In this paper, we propose Vega, a 3DGS-based photo-realistic full-scene volumetric video streaming system that ensures real-time playback on mobile devices. The core idea behind Vega's real-time rendering is object-level selective computation, which allocates computational resources to visually important objects to meet strict rendering deadlines. To enable mobile streaming based on the selective computation, Vega addresses two challenges: (1) designing an encoding scheme that optimizes the data size of videos while being compatible with object-level prioritization, and (2) developing a rendering pipeline that efficiently operates on resource-constrained mobile devices. We implemented an end-to-end Vega system, consisting of a streaming server and an Android application. Experimental results on commodity smartphones show that Vega achieves 30 frames per second (FPS) for full-scene volumetric video streaming while maintaining competitive data size and visual quality compared to existing baselines.