Exploitation of 3D video technologies

3D video is not an artificial CG animation but a real 3D movie recording the full 3D shape, motion, and precise surface color & texture of real world objects. It enables us to observe real object behaviors from any viewpoints as well as to see pop-up 3D object images. We believe the exploitation of 3D video technologies will open up a new world of versatile cultural and social activities: visual communication, entertainment, training & learning, archiving, and so on. We give an overview of our research attainments so far obtained: (1) a PC cluster system with distributed active cameras for real-time 3D shape reconstruction, (2) a dynamic 3D mesh deformation method for obtaining accurate 3D object shape, (3) a texture mapping algorithm for high fidelity visualization, and (4) user friendly 3D video editing system.