Time-lapse: an immersive interactive environment based on historic stereo images

With the rapid expansion of virtual environments in research, entertainment, art and industry, the need for a larger variety of image sources for the construction of these environments has become an important issue. Recent computer modeling has become increasingly sophisticated, and digital effects for movies such as "Titanic", "Star Wars" and other Hollywood productions are not short on convincing realism and dazzling effects. However, the creation of these effects is still very time-consuming and their rendering processes are slow. In the past few years, a new technique called image-based modeling and rendering (IBMR) has appeared; in this approach, photographs are used directly for the creation of virtual environments. Although this technique is also limited by the amount of geometry one can derive from these photographs, the advantages of having immediate photorealistic results and high speed in handling these pictures cannot be neglected. We have applied IBMR techniques to historic stereo photographs taken from the collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. After extracting the photographs' depth information, we assembled these photographs and used them for the construction of an immersive virtual environment called "Time-lapse". In this system, users can enter these historic stereo images and interact with them through body gestures and body movements.