Bringing Real Life Into VR Using Videos

The multimedia industry is constantly pushing to deliver more and more immersive experiences. Instead of watching a flat screen (e.g. to watch movies, to stream, to teleconference, etc.), technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) allow a user to move around in a virtual world with six degrees-of-freedom. I present a pipeline that captures real-world environments using cameras, reconstructs the scene in 3D, and allows a viewer to walk through the reconstruction in using VR. To achieve real-time rendering in VR (90 frames per second), several trade-offs need to be made between computational performance and visual quality. During the demo, the users will be able to explore multiple environments in VR created through the pipeline. Through these user experiments, the quality of experience of the system at different trade-offs can be measured.