Page 8 - ITU Journal, ICT Discoveries, Volume 3, No. 1, June 2020 Special issue: The future of video and immersive media

ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries, Vol. 3(1), June 2020

Guest Editors’ message

Among all the types of data that travel through the internet and mobile networks everyday, video
represents by far the largest portion of traffic – about 80% by some estimates. And the volume of video
traffic continues to grow exponentially in response to the continuously and rapidly rising demand for
higher video quality and emerging modalities of communication that promise to deliver truly immersive
experiences for an expanding variety of existing and new applications. Moreover, the emergence of the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has brought about a dramatic increase in our reliance on audiovisual
media communication and entertainment in ways that may further accelerate demand and bring about
permanent changes in our daily habits.
Video standards produced by the ITU in collaboration with ISO and IEC have been able to provide
superior compression capabilities and features at reasonable implementation complexity. They have
been a significant driver and enabler of the rapid growth in the media industry, not only increasing the
efficiency and reducing the cost of existing applications, but more importantly creating opportunities to
innovate on new applications and new modalities, making possible what was previously not. The
widespread conformance to these standards has fostered market growth in the past three decades, and
continues to usher in new technologies and new applications.

World Standards Day 2019 was celebrated with the theme “Video standards create a global stage” in
October 2019. The celebration included a workshop organized by the ITU on “The Future of Media,”
held at the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. At the workshop, experts shared insights into the
state of the art in multimedia and made projections into the future considering emerging applications
and new possibilities, among which immersive media and machine learning were actively discussed as
areas of recent breakthroughs and stronger focus in future research and development. This special issue
of the ITU Journal: ICT Discoveries carries on that discussion with deeper look from the perspectives
of standards, technology, industry and societal impact. After a thorough peer review process that
provided valuable feedback to improve the submitted manuscripts, we are glad to introduce to the
readers this carefully selected collection of papers covering a wide range of timely topics.

Two of these papers focus on new modalities of immersive media (in the form of video, audio and
images) and how they are transforming our life today and into the future. Two papers, “Delivering
Object-Based Immersive Media Experiences in Sports” and “Arena-style Immersive Live Experience
(ILE) Services and Systems: Highly Realistic Sensations for Everyone in the World,” offer a glimpse
into enriching the audience experience at sports, concerts and other live events using immersive media.
With emerging systems like Intel Sports and Kirari! for Arena, capabilities of interactivity and
personalization are enhanced, and a compelling experience is guaranteed regardless of whether one is
watching on-site or remotely, and on what device.
Immersive media also enables remote education, another very important emerging application that has
suddenly become the primary model of formal education in the months leading up to this special issue.
The paper “Beyond the Frontiers of Education: How Immersive Media Changes the Way We Learn”
illustrates the potential of applying immersive media to education, an essential human activity that
traditionally must be conducted locally, in order to transcend the limitation of space. With remote
education, educational content developed anywhere can be delivered to everywhere, helping to bridge
the educational gap among different parts of the world.

The most advanced technology must also be accessible by being designed with consideration of the
needs of the full variety of people in our society. The paper “Immersive Media and Accessibility:
Hand in Hand to the Future” presents approaches to achieve a seamless presentation of accessibility
services (subtitling, audio description and sign language) such that all consumers are given an
opportunity to interact with and immerse themselves in virtual reality applications.

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