Case Study: RenderHeads x Google

Who doesn’t want to be part of an immersive 180-degree VR short film called ‘Asteroid’!? With the deadline being the premiere at Cannes Lions 2025, and the target hardware being an all new headset, namely the Samsung Galaxy XR. With partners like Google, 30 Ninjas, Google 100 Zeros, it was the dream ticket for RenderHeads. 

‘Asteroid’ required the highest quality playback achievable, to showcase the new Samsung GalaxyXR headset (utilising Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip). The goal was to achieve 4K per eye @60fp and implement MV-HEVC, whilst supporting 3rd order ambisonic audio on the yet unreleased Samsung headset. Spatial audio was essential to fully realise the immersive soundscape, along with the high-fidelity visuals delivered to each eye.

RenderHeads dug deep into AVPro Video and implemented support for AndroidXR, OpenXR, and MV-HEVC. The result? The release of AVPro Video XR Composition Layers. Link

AVPro Video XR Composition Layers overview

• MV-HEVC playback – Playback of MV-HEVC content when using Android XR on supported hardware.
• Improved clarity and sharpness – Due to not having to go through the standard eye projection.
• Improved performance – As we no longer have to copy the video images over to Unity in order to render them.
• Reduced memory consumption – As we no longer need to maintain texture buffers to hold the video images currently being rendered from by Unity

The AVPro Video XR Composition Layers package builds on top of Unity’s XR composition layers support to provide direct rendering of video content to a composition layer on supported platforms.

Requires 

• AVPro Video Core, Core Mobile or Ultra editions version 3.3.3 or later