A System for Acquiring, Processing, and Rendering Panoramic Light Field Stills for Virtual Reality

摘要

We present a system for acquiring, processing, and rendering panoramiclight field still photography for display in Virtual Reality (VR). We acquirespherical light field datasets with two novel light field camera rigs designedfor portable and efficient light field acquisition. We introduce a novel realtimelight field reconstruction algorithm that uses a per-view geometry anda disk-based blending field. We also demonstrate how to use a light fieldprefiltering operation to project from a high-quality offline reconstructionmodel into our real-time model while suppressing artifacts. We introduce apractical approach for compressing light fields by modifying the VP9 videocodec to provide high quality compression with real-time, random accessdecompression.We combine these components into a complete light field system offeringconvenient acquisition, compact file size, and high-quality rendering while generating stereo views at 90Hz on commodity VR hardware. Using oursystem, we built a freely available light field experience application calledWelcome to Light Fields featuring a library of panoramic light field stills forconsumer VR which has been downloaded over 15,000 times.