Blackmagic Design announced today that Japan’s DeNA Co., Ltd. and its group company SHOWROOM inc. used a number of Blackmagic Design’s capture and playback devices, including DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G, DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K and Intensity Pro 4K, for their new VR streaming system called SHOWROOM VR. Through SHOWROOM VR, artists and musicians communicate using high quality VR media.

DeNA is a major venture company participating in various fields of business, including ecommerce, gaming, sports, automotive, heath care, education and artificial intelligence. It is also well known in Japan for acquiring a professional baseball team, the Yokohama DeNA BayStars.

The original SHOWROOM service was a live streaming platform started by DeNA in 2013 and it became one of the group companies. Unlike normal streaming platforms, there is a system in SHOWROOM where viewers can send in virtual items, called gifts, and the streaming musicians and artists get paid accordingly. In 2016, DeNA launched SHOWROOM VR and created a studio inside the company for VR streaming, allowing artists to create 180° 3D media.

Designed by DeNA’s engineer of technology development of system management unit, Takeyuki Ogura, the SHOWROOM VR is a custom built service using DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G, DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K and Intensity Pro 4K and NVIDIA GPUs. Built around the DeckLink SDK, DeNA was able to capture, synch, shoot, convert and streaming signals from two 180° cameras.

The two 180° cameras output two 2160p29.97 signals to a custom built PC, which houses the DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G, DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K, Intensity Pro 4K and an NVIDIA GPU. The left signal is captured on DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G or Intensity Pro 4K while the right signal is captured on DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K. The two signals are synced and converted on the GPU and sent out from DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G or DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K. The combined signal is captured and sent to live streaming software using DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K.

Takeyuki Ogura said: “It was essential that the Blackmagic devices support the NVIDIA GPU Direct. Having looked for capture cards supporting it, I found DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G and other Blackmagic PCIe interfaces most suitable for our purpose. And I found it advantageous that DeckLink SDK is published on the web, and a sample program in the SDK that uses NVIDIA GPU was helpful too. Blackmagic cards have great compatibility with PCs, so they were easy to integrate into the system.”

“Viewers watch the streams wearing VR goggles and look at some part of the whole picture. It was necessary to stream in 4K and I chose Blackmagic capture cards because they all support 4K. If the resolution is high, viewers can feel as if they were in the same space as the idols and artists are in. We are expecting to apply this VR streaming technology in other fields, like travel, sports and education,” he concluded.