From Reality to Immersive VR: What’s missing in VR?

Current endeavors towards immersive visual entertainment are still almost entirely based on 3D graphics-generated content, limiting application scenarios to virtual worlds only. The reason is that in order to provide for stereo vision and ego-motion parallax, two essential ingredients for genuine visual immersion perception, the scene must be rendered in real-time from arbitrary vantage points. While this can be easily accomplished with 3D graphics via standard GPU rendering, it is not at all straight-forward to do the same from conventional video footage acquired of real-world events. In my talk I will outline avenues of research toward enabling the immersive experience of real-world recordings and how to enhance the immersive viewing experience by taking perceptual issues into account. I will report on the latest results of our project “Immersive Digital Reality” which is

funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG MA2555/15-1).