Modeling Immersive Environments using
Images
with QuickTimeVR
As presented to
the Silicon
Valley Chapter of SIGGRAPH (silicon_valley_chapter@siggraph.org)
April 27, 1999 meeting
(converted to HTML)
Ken Turkowski
Immersive Media Technology Development
Interactive Media Group
Apple Computer, Inc.
turk@apple.com
Virtual Reality: Interactive Immersive Imaging
- Immersion: the scene surrounds the user
- Interaction: the user has control over what he sees
3D Modeling is Hard
- Modeling software is complex, difficult to learn
- Requires a lot of time to make an interesting scene
- It takes a long time to render an interesting 3D scene
3D demo
- over a month to model
- 25,786 polygons, pre-shaded with radiosity
- 150,000 polygons per second
- 4.2 frames per second
- pretty realistic
- obvious aliasing
How to make an interesting 3D scene?
- Add texture!
- QuickTimeVR takes this to the extreme
Panorama
The imagesbelow are courtesy of Dr.
Leonard McMillan, at MIT. There's a very informative, interactive
explanation of image-based renderinghis online, java-enhanced
presentation
on image-based rendering. They illustrate some simple geometric
primitives useful for representing panoramas.
- Simple geometry with a high resolution texture
- Inside, looking out
- Captured from a single point
Interactive Rendering of Panoramas
Methods for Capturing Panoramas
- Slit Camera
- Capture several perspective images and stitch
- Capture several fisheye mages and stitch
- Render from a 3D modeler
- to a cylinder
- to several faces, then warp and merge
Creating Cylindrical Panoramas
- Capture several images from the same point
- Register Images
- Project Perspective Image to Cylinder
- Blend Images
Capturing Images (equipment)
- Equipment:
- camera (film or digital)
- lens with wide field of view desirable
- tripod
- pan head, for portrait mode
Capturing images (calibration)
- level tripod
- adjust camera so that lens nodal point goes through the tripod
axis
Capturing Images (photography)
- photograph at equal angular increments
- develop film as PhotoCD or other digital format
- download digital images to computer
Projecting Images to Cylinder
Object Movies
- Interactive viewing of an object from several points of
view
Creating Object Movies
Integration
- Linking panoramas to panoramas
- Linking panoramas to objects
- Linking objects to panorama
- Linking objects to objects
Future directons
Computer Vision Methods
- Multi-Baseline Stereo Reconstruction
- Structure from Motion
- Structured Light
- Time-of-flight
Calibrated Equipment Methods
- Panoramas
- Light Fields
- Lumigraph
Web Links
[ computer
graphics | QuickTime
VR Panoramas | QuickTime
VR ]
[ 
QuickTime VR Home
Page |
QuickTime Home Page |
Apple Home Page]