Meet Spaceport

Good news! Our documentation has moved to antmedia.io/docs.

Volumetric video is a field of a media production technique that captures a three-dimensional space such as a place, person, or any object. Spaceport developed by Ant Media creates an end-to-end solution to capture dynamic scenes and offers a truly three-dimensional viewing experience with 6 Degrees of Freedom. It supports video playback on

• VR Goggles
• Web Browsers
• Mobile Devices

This document shows how you can install Spaceport and it is laid out in a fashion that allows you to use it as a reference while you’re building Spaceport. It is intended for readers who have prior exposure to Azure Kinect Sensor SDK and ROS.

Releases

Spaceport 1.5 (March 1, 2022)

• Hardcodec encoding
• User interface to control the publishers
• Improvements on the registration process
• FPS improvements

Spaceport 1.4 (December 17, 2021)

• h264 Support
• Point Cloud rendering on Publisher side
• Point Cloud Texture improvements

Spaceport 1.3 (August 21, 2021)

• Support point cloud recording and replay in Web-Player
• Voxel grid filter & statistical condition filter
• Fix audio-video sync && memory leakage
• Off-screen canvas support for Volumetric Video Player

Spaceport 1.2 (June 10, 2021)

• Dynamic light adjustment for varying illumination condition
• Support Jetson Nano (It`s also compatible with TX2, Xavier)
• Raw audio recording support for Volumetric Capture
• Improvements in texture quality
• Fix segmentation faults during processing volumetric video

Spaceport 1.1 (April 1, 2021)

• Improvements in the end to end volumetric capture
• Fix memory leak in Volumetric Web Player
• Poisson surface reconstruction

Supported Environments

Spaceport runs on Linux(Ubuntu). It supports only x64 architecture for Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04.

Recommended environments: Spaceport Publisher: Ubuntu 18.04 Spaceport Subscriber: Ubuntu 20.04

Initial Configuration

Before moving forward, you have to have already installed ROS. We are using ROS Melodic Morenia on Publisher machines but it is supported until April 2023, when Ubuntu 18.04 will reach EOL as well. So, you can install ROS Noetic by then. If you want to perform a quick installation, you can follow this documentation. However, keep in mind that not all details are mentioned here. Please, for a detailed description visit here and here.

ROS Melodic Morenia

Step 1: The first step is adding the ROS repository to your ubuntu sources.list

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc)main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

Step 2: Add Official ROS repo keyring

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80' --recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654

Step 3: And finally, update your packages list

sudo apt update

Step 4: Install ROS Melodic desktop package on Ubuntu 18.04

sudo apt install ros-melodic-desktop-full

Step 5: Let’s configure our environment. This is a very important step, once we have it done, working with ROS will be smooth.

echo "source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

We are almost there!

Step 6: To install this tool and other dependencies for building ROS packages, run:

sudo apt install python-rosdep python-rosinstall python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool build-essential

Step 7: With the following, you can initialize rosdep.

sudo apt install python-rosdep

sudo rosdep init

rosdep update

Now, you have ROS Melodic installed and ready to use!

Step 8:At this point, we must have everything in place. Let’s try some ROS commands to make sure the installation has finished successfully.

roscore

Your terminal must be stuck here, therefore, you can not execute anything else while you have the roscore process there. Roscore is running and ready to serve other ROS processes!

ROS Noetic

Step 1:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

Step 2: curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.asc | sudo apt-key add -

Step 3:

sudo apt update

Step 4:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-desktop-full

Step 5:

echo "source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

source ~/.bashrc

We are almost there!

Step 6:

sudo apt install python-rosdep python-rosinstall python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool build-essential

Step 7:

sudo apt install python-rosdep

sudo rosdep init

rosdep update

Step 8: Please try some ROS commands to make sure the installation has finished successfully again.

Next Step: Network Setup