We present the ICG Dome, a research facility to explore human visual perception in a high-resolution virtual environment. Current state-of-the-art VR devices still suffer from some technical limitations, like limited field of view, screen-door effect or so-called god-rays. These issues are not present or at least strongly reduced in our system, by design. Latest technology for real-time motion capture and eye tracking open up a wide range of applications.

Recent advances in free-viewpoint rendering techniques as well as the continued improvements of the internet network infrastructure open the door for challenging new applications. In this paper, we present a framework for interactive free-viewpoint streaming with open standards and software. Network bandwidth, encoding strategy as well as codec support for open source browsers are key constraints to be considered for our interactive streaming applications. Our framework is capable of real-time server-side rendering and interactively streaming the output by means of open source streaming. To enable viewer interaction with the free-viewpoint video rendering back-end in a standard browser, user events are captured with Javascript and transmitted using WebSockets. The rendered video is streamed to the browser using the FFmpeg free software project. This paper discusses the applicability of open source streaming and presents timing measurements for video-frame transmission over network.