Virtualized reality: concepts and early results

The visual medium evolved from early paintings to the realistic paintings of the classical era to photographs. The medium of moving imagery started with motion pictures. Television and video recording advanced it to show action "live" or capture and playback later. In all of the above media, the view of the scene is determined at the transcription time, independent of the viewer. We have been developing a new visual medium called virtualized reality. It delays the selection of the viewing angle until view time, using techniques from computer vision and computer graphics. The visual event is captured using many cameras that cover the action from all sides. The 3D structure of the event, aligned with the pixels of the image, is computed for a few selected directions using a stereo technique. Triangulation and texture mapping enable the placement of a "soft-camera" to reconstruct the event from any new viewpoint. With a stereo-viewing system, virtualized reality allows a viewer to move freely in the scene, independent of the transcription angles used to record the scene. We describe the hardware and software setup in our "studio" to make virtualized reality movies. Examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.