Live events are an integral part of our society. From classical concerts to festivals, people want to gather impressions with their own senses. Not only the current COVID-19 pandemic but also ecological and practical life factors, such as traveling for too long or the lack of childcare in the evening, mean that many people cannot physically attend events. This is precisely where technical solutions come in, making an audience experience possible through audiovisual immersion that comes much closer to “being there live” than previously standard formats.

The rapid development of digital media formats and offerings in combination with increasingly powerful playback devices such as smartphones or tablets offers a wide range of opportunities for digitally supplementing traditional performance practices, for example at concerts, plays, or other event formats such as congresses or trade fairs. In addition, digitization also offers extensive opportunities for developing new, independent formats and addressing new target groups.

The complexity of new technologies and the often associated high implementation costs for their online platforms make it difficult for cultural professionals to offer their services at the current state of the art. The three institutes Fraunhofer FOKUS, Fraunhofer HHI and Fraunhofer IIS have launched the project Virtual LiVe. In this context, Virtual LiVe aims to develop a platform that provides suitable and scalable high-end solutions for the event streaming needs of different industries in the form of a modular system. From this modular system, SMEs can put together a customized program for their individual event needs and thus obtain a technology-based solution to realizetheir formats. Existing offerings should thus be significantly surpassed in terms of quality, accessibility (payment barriers, hardware integration, the prerequisite of high Internet speed, etc.), and legal aspects (especially concerning the topics of data sovereignty and EU data protection directives).

Innovative media technologies provided by Fraunhofer FOKUS will play a central role in enabling low-latency adaptive bitrate streaming via content delivery networks and using streaming formats such as MPEG-DASH and CMAF. The standard-compliant MPEG DASH end-to-end solution FAMIUM DASH will be used for this purpose on a variety of platforms like Mobile, Web, TV and VR. The dash.js open source reference player maintained by Fraunhofer FOKUS will be used as an underlying player on all Web-based platforms. With low-latency mode activated, seamless interaction and audience feedback can be achieved during live events. In addition, the FAMIUM SAND metric reporting and streaming analytics tool will be integrated in the Virtual Live platform to monitor the streaming performance and QoE.

Virtual LiVe is hosted at the 3IT Innovation Center and funded under the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's “KMU-akut” program “Forschung für den Mittelstand (Research for SMEs)”.