Virtual reality (VR) is the latest “cool” technology and you can now choose from a plethora of virtual reality headsets and systems to play with. However, it is still in its infancy and the technology is not yet truly immersive.
You may have heard mention of 6DoF, which stands for “six degrees of freedom”. This refers to how much freedom of movement a rigid body has in a three-dimensional (3D) space, so if you were to imagine the X, Y and Z axes, ideally you would need to have the ability to go forward or backward (known as “surge”), up or down (known as “heave”), or left and right (known as “sway”).
6DoF is of especial interest to everyone in the burgeoning VR industry, because at the moment there is still a limit to what you can achieve with monoscopic 360 degree videos – the images still appear flat.
VR experiences have the 6DoF problem sorted because everything is computer animated, so the VR headset is able to track the scale of the room to understand exactly where the player is in the room.
If you know exactly where the player is, then you can make calculations so that motions made by the user, such as moving backwards or forwards can be translated into movements within the game.
Light field cameras and holograms
But if you want to do this with a human in a recorded video, such as Björk’s 360 degree music video for Stonemilker, then at the moment it’s only possible with extremely expensive image capture technology.
The startup Lytro uses cameras that work by capturing the geometry of light to make live action 360-degree scenes possible. However, their light field cameras cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and can only be afforded by high-end Hollywood blockbuster film products.
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Adobe’s 6DoF breakthrough using just one 360-degree camera
Multimedia creativity software firm Adobe has also been working on solving the 6DoF problem, and its scientists believe they have managed it without needing a lot of expensive technology – just one single 360-degree camera.
In an open access paper entitled 6-DOF VR Videos with a Single 360-Camera, the researchers describe how they developed a warping algorithm that is able to figure out how monoscopic 360-degree video footage would look if it was stereoscopic, by inferring what the camera path and 3D scene geometry should look like and removing any possible distortions.
The result is a monoscopic 360-degree video that can be played in VR headsets, where it turns into a stereoscopic video that allows for 6DoF at more than 120fps.
The algorithm can also be used to stabilise 360-degree video or to create different versions of the video to suit viewers with varying degrees of motion comfort levels, but it can only be used if the camera that shot the original footage was moving at the time when of filming.
“We assume the camera moves to infer the depth,” Adobe’s head of research Gavin Miller toldVariety. “If the camera rotates but does not move side to side we cannot compute depth but can stabilise the rotation.”
Source: IBTimes