International and national standards for Immersive Live Experience adopted by ITU-T and TTC -Enhancing reproducibility and reducing management costs-

The first national standards for Immersive Live Experience*1 (ILE), compliant with the global ITU-T*2 standards, were adopted by TTC*3 on February 20th, 2020.
NTT has been actively participating in activities on the global standardization of ILE at ITU-T. In November 2019, ITU-T Recommendations H.430.4, which defines the media transport protocols and signaling information for ILE, was adopted.
NTT has formed partnerships with professional sports leagues in and out of Japan*4. The standards are expected to accelerate business collaborations.

1.Background

NTT has conducted research and development on 'Kirari!', a telecommunication technology for realizing ultra-reality. For example, 'Kirari!' can transport spatial information such as the positions and sizes of players along with video and audio to reproduce a real event venue (source site) as if the event is happening in a remote venue (viewing site) for ultra-realistic live public screening. Another example use case of 'Kirari!' is to provide super-wide angle views for surveillance services in the field of security.
NTT worked with various partners to have the Question on ILE initiated in ITU-T SG16 and has been promoting standardization activities to create novel value through telecommunication technology that provides the experience of ultra-reality in real time. NTT has driven efforts at SG16 meetings to have draft Recommendations on requirements and on other issues adopted by ITU-T with the cooperation of various partners.
NTT has also promoted national standardization activities on ILE by TTC along with international standardization activities by ITU-T.

2.Standards on ILE

Tables 1 and 2 show the standards on ILE adopted by ITU-T and TTC, respectively. The high-level architecture of ILE systems is shown in Fig. 1. The series of standards stipulate such issues as the architecture of the ILE and the specific syntax for ILE data transport.
H.430.1 defines the general requirements and the high-level functional requirements for ILE services, and H.430.2 identifies the general framework and high-level functional architecture for ILE services. These Recommendations clarify the fundamental concept of ILE services.
H.430.3 categorizes ILE service scenarios and provides use cases, clarifying the new experiences enabled by ILE services.
H.430.4 identifies media transport formats, which are an extension of MPEG media transport (MMT)*5, for ILE systems to synchronously transport spatial information such as the positions of objects along with video and audio.

NTT has been actively involved in the national standardization activities of TTC to promote these global standards in Japan, and JT-H430.2, the first national standards on ILE, was adopted by TTC in February 2020.

Table 1: Global standards on ILE (ITU-T)

Table 2: Global standards on ILE (TTC)

Fig. 1: High-level architecture of immersive live experience system

3.Features

There had been no standards on ILE before the adoption of the ITU-T H.430 standards, which define the architecture and common configurations for ILE systems. They also enable the transport of spatial information along with video and audio in a common format between a source site and viewing site.
The standards enable ultra-realistic reproduction of an event including spatial positions, which are difficult to realize with video and audio only. They also enable experiences with higher reality in real time. Also, utilizing the additional information enables automatic positional configuration, which had previously been conducted manually. A reduction in management costs is also expected.

4.Future prospects

NTT aims to install systems conformant to the standards for such business fields as live public screening of sports events, which we expect to become more popular, and super-wide angle views for security surveillance services.

NTT will collaborate with global and national standardizing organizations to promote the standards.

Glossary