OTOY demonstrates first ever light field capture of a real world environment
At FMX 2015 cloud graphics company, OTOY Inc., announced the first ever capture of a spherical light field of a real world environment used to produce a completely accurate, navigable scene in virtual reality.
"In a session titled “Light Fields for Virtual Reality”, OTOY’s Chief Scientific Consultant, Paul Debevec, demonstrated the groundbreaking process used to capture the light field of a room using a prototype camera array. The light field data of the room was rendered instantaneously in VR, mirroring the reality and grit of the natural world, while allowing a user in that world to look in any direction and move around in the space as if they were actually there."
The groundbreaking demonstration marks an important step for the medium, opening the door to compelling, authentic virtual reality recreations of popular travel and tourism sites, and new sports and entertainment opportunities, while moving the industry closer to achieving photorealistic live action VR experiences using light fields and the ultimate goal of enabling a complete sense of presence when in a VR environment. Just as light fields have been used to capture feature film actors and actresses to create exacting digital doubles for special effects use, light fields can now be used to capture environments with the same level of detail for virtual reality.
Despite the complexity of the scene, the compression capabilities of OTOY’s ORBX media format produces a manageable file size for the light field scene while enabling the high frame rates VR applications need.
See the OTOY press release with the video here: http://home.otoy.com/otoy-demonstrates-first-ever-light-field-capture-for-vr/