ngp-encode-server

ngp-encode-server receives VR user's head position and field of view, and renders the view corresponding to user position using instant-ngp. The goal of this program is to study whether Neural Radiance Field technology is suitable for background generation of immersive VR environments.

To elaborate, ngp-encode-server receives the user's field of view and head position from ngp-client. The program requests to render a frame containing the scene and the depth data generated by NeRF, corresponding to the received user position, to multiple instances of instant-ngp-renderer, which is a customized version of instant-ngp. The views are encoded to a video using H.264 codec and streamed to the ngp-client via WebSocket. ngp-client decodes the packet using WebCodecs and plays it to the user's VR device. The client only uses web standards-compliant technologies, and does not have to rely on external programs or plug-ins.

Requirements

• A C++20 compatable compiler. (GCC 8 or later)
• Linux distribution of your choice. Distributions other than Ubuntu 20.04 has not been tested.

Dependencies

• libavcodec
• libavformat
• libavutil
• libswscale
• freetype2
• libwebsocketpp
• OpenSSL
• libprotobuf

If you are using Ubuntu 20.04, install the following packages;

sudo apt install build-essential    \
                 cmake              \
                 git                \
                 gcc-10             \
                 libavcodec-dev     \
                 libavformat-dev    \
                 libavutil-dev      \
                 libswscale-dev     \
                 libfreetype-dev    \
                 libwebsocketpp-dev \
                 libssl-dev         \
                 libprotobuf-dev

Compilation

Begin by cloning this repository and all its submodules using the following command:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/moonsikpark/ngp-encode-server
$ cd ngp-encode-server

Then, use CMake to build the project:

ngp-encode-server$ cmake . -B build
ngp-encode-server$ cmake --build build --config RelWithDebInfo -j $(nproc)

If the build succeeds, you can now run the code via the build/neserver executable.

Author

Moonsik Park, Korea Instutute of Science and Tecnhology - moonsik.park@kist.re.kr

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2022 Moonsik Park. All rights reserved.