Hardly a day has gone by this month without the announcement of a new virtual reality (VR) camera system. Facebook,Google and GoPro all aim to make VR more immersive with new cameras, some of which won’t be commercially released for the foreseeable future. However, researchers at Adobe believe that you may not need new camera hardware at all for a big leap in immersion.
Adobe’s head of research Gavin Miller is going to present new cutting-edge technology at NAB in Las Vegas this Tuesday that could one day be used to turn flat, monoscopic 360-degree videos shot with consumer-grade spherical cameras into fully immersive VR video, complete with the ability to lean into the video — something that’s being called six degrees of freedom (6DoF) among industry insiders.
The difference between monoscopic 360-degree video and VR experiences offering six degrees of freedom is especially important for users of high-end VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. These headsets offer room-scale tracking, which means that the headset knows where in the room the viewer is, accurately translating a motion like “leaning forward” into corresponding visuals.
Doing this is relatively easy with computer-generated imagery, but giving the viewer the freedom to actually move around in a recorded video requires cutting-edge image capture technology. Light field camera systems for example, like the one developed by Lytro, potentially cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
However, Adobe’s scientists have figured out a way to deduct crucial information about a room by analyzing the movement of a camera through something they call a “structure-from-motion” algorithm (for the technically inclined: here’s a research paper on the approach).
That data can then be used to generate new perspectives to account for different viewpoints, giving viewers the ability to truly lean in to a video that previously wasn’t even 3D. The technology could also be used to stabilize 360-degree video, or to generate different versions of a video that work for users with varying degrees of motion comfort levels.
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Source: Variety