Bringing real-time volumetric video streaming to the developer community
Volumetric video communication has long captured our industry’s imagination. For decades, it has promised remote interaction that feels more natural, more spatial, and more human than conventional 2D video. Nokia has worked to turn that vision into reality by developing standards-based volumetric video communication that captures, compresses, streams, decodes, and renders volumetric video in real time. Today, we are taking the next step by open sourcing VolStream, our reference implementation, to demonstrate the benefits of this software which supports real-time streaming of compressed volumetric video. VolStream is being made available under a BSD 3-Clause Clear License. Use of the underlying patented inventions remains governed by our licensing program.
From vision to real-time streaming
VolStream serves a practical goal: enabling real-time transmission of compressed volumetric content at latencies suitable for interaction. Traditional volumetric media often rely on pre-encoded assets and offline workflows. By contrast, this open-source reference implementation enables live operation from end to end, covering encoding, streaming, decoding, and rendering in a real-time pipeline. That matters most in use cases where people need to interact naturally, including remote collaboration, training, telepresence, entertainment, or other extended reality experiences. The software achieves conversationally relevant glass-to-glass latencies while operating on commercially available hardware and bandwidth.
With this open-source reference implementation, VolStream will help researchers, developers, and the ecosystem explore and understand what immersive communication can achieve when it is built on open, standardized solutions. Rather than treating volumetric video as an isolated experiment, the software shows how live communication can integrate into existing delivery pipelines using technologies designed for interoperability and scalability.
Built on open standards
A central strength of the approach is its foundation in standards rather than proprietary silos. MPEG Visual Volumetric Video-based Coding (V3C) [1] provides a framework for compressing immersive visual scenes efficiently, while reusing existing 2D video coding tools to make deployment more practical and cost-efficient. In real-time scenarios, standardized RTP payload format [2] lets compressed volumetric video travel over established delivery mechanisms, opening the door to broader experimentation and ecosystem integration. This standards-based direction matters for developers who want to build interoperable components, compare implementations, and accelerate adoption without starting from scratch. The software also works with depth sensing cameras (RGBD) to preserve scene geometry without requiring complex reconstruction workflows on the receiving side, which is especially important when minimizing latency. It supports 2- to 8-camera setups using Kinect Azure DK or Orbbec Femto Bolt cameras. Developers can try volumetric video streaming with pre-recorded sample videos, without dedicated cameras. Further details on the software’s core features are available in an ISM 2023 paper [3] and on our GitHub repository [4].
Lowering the barrier to experimentation
We believe real progress toward mainstream 3D communication depends on demonstrations of the technology and its benefits and shared experimentation. Developers and researchers need reference implementations to evaluate trade-offs in coding efficiency, system architecture, transport, interoperability, and rendering. Through this reference implementation, the software can now be explored, tested, and optimized in practice to accelerate innovation and help the community understand how these solutions perform on real devices and in real applications.
This open-source reference implementation of VolStream is both a milestone and an invitation. It is a milestone because it shows that real-time compressed volumetric video communication is moving beyond isolated prototypes toward reusable software building blocks. It is also an invitation, because the future of immersive communication will be shaped by a broad ecosystem of contributors, implementers, and creators. We are excited to see how the community uses this software to test ideas, extend capabilities, and build new experiences that make 3D live communication part of everyday life.
Explore the VolStream reference implementation and test it for yourself on GitHub.
By making VolStream available on GitHub, we hope to support wider experimentation and accelerate progress toward interoperable real-time 3D communication. We welcome feedback, questions and collaboration from developers, researchers and ecosystem partners.
[1] https://www.iso.org/standard/89030.html
[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-avtcore-rtp-v3c/
[3] https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/ism/2023/957600a052/1Vt0DtzJDTG
[4] https://github.com/nokiatech/VolStream
