Virtualized Reality: Digitizing a 3D Time-Varying Real Event As Is and in
Real Time
Takeo Kanade
The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
I will present the CMU Virtualized Reality project. Digital imaging of
two-dimensional pictures is common today. Capturing an entire 3D scene or
even a time-varying event into a computer as a 3D form, however, is very
difficult and rarely done. Imagine a few players playing basketball on a
court. Can we digitize the whole scene into a computer as a "3D event", not
as a collection of pictures, but as its three-dimensional, time-varying, and
volumetric/surface representation? If we could do so, we can use the
representation for various purposes. For example, we can think of a "soft"
camera - creating images from any arbitrary viewpoints and angles at which
there were not cameras originally. With a soft camera, one can see the
basketball game from any view point independent of physical limitations or
other viewers' interest: from inside of the court, from the referee's point
of view, or even from the ball's eye point of view. Image rendering,
however, is not the only application. We can archive, manipulate, combine,
and alter real events - a whole new notion of "event archiving and
manipulation" or "Virtualized Reality".
Since 1993, we have been developing Virtualized Reality technologies with
the 3D Room - a fully digital room that can capture events occurring in it
by many (at this moment 50) video cameras. I will describe the theory,
facility, computation, and results of the project.
About the Speaker
Takeo Kanade received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from
Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position at
Department of Information Science, Kyoto University, he joined Carnegie
Mellon University in 1980, where he is currently Director of the Robotics
Institute and U. A. Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer
Science. Dr. Kanade has performed research in multiple areas of robotics:
vision, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, and sensors, and has
written more than 150 technical papers and 10 patents.
Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, a
Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of ACM, and a Founding Fellow of American
Association of Artificial Intelligence. He has received several awards,
including the Joseph Engelberger Award, JARA Award, and a few best paper
awards at international conferences and journals. Dr. Kanade has served for
many government, industry, and university advisory boards, including
Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB) of National Research Council
and Advisory Board of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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Last modified:
Tue Sep 21 18:59:46 PDT 1999