Virtual Reality, VR, and Augmented Reality, AR, have captured humanity's imagination for decades, where the science fiction motion picture plays an essential role in exciting the public about their immense potential of reweaving the social fabric of the future human society. I still remember how impressed I was after watching the science fiction movie "Iron" for the first time in my youth year. The original storyline of main characters teleporting between the real world and the virtual world that they created was fascinating and the world-leading computer animation technology used in this film certainly piqued people interest in what our future might hold. After 40 years of intense research and development efforts, many technology companies such as Apple, Meta, and Google, have now set their sight on VR/AR technologies as a major initiative to power their future growth with the goal of completely erasing the separation between the real and the virtual world. Thus, simply describing an object with its measured color in a controlled environment and a lighting condition is no longer sufficient, and the image research community is being challenged to establish a physical appearance model, which can faithfully describe the color, surface texture and physical properties, such as rigidity and opacity, of an object under different viewing environments in a computationally efficient numerical model.
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