Macro 3D Mushrooms VR180 - Part 1

Get up close an personal with giant mushrooms in this 3D VR short film. It is created using Volurama (https://volurama.com), a tool for Windows and Mac for creating photorealistic 3D models and panoramas from videos captured with a phone, using cutting edge computer vision (neural radiance fields). It can render the captured scenes from a virtual VR180 camera, which means it is possible to create 3D VR videos like this without buying an expensive VR camera; a regular iPhone or most other phones is all you need to capture.

Perception of size in 3D VR video is a subtle topic, but one of the main things which influences how big we perceive things in VR is the distance between the cameras. For the scene to feel like it is normal scale, this should match the distance between a user's eyes (interpupilary distance, IPD), which is on average about 6.4cm. If the VR camera lens separation does not match the user's eyes, the scene will appear smaller or larger than reality (which is usually not a desirable effect; in this case we are doing it intentionally). In order to make a mushroom appear to be giant, it would be necessary to get a pair of cameras much closer together than 6.4cm, and that is not easy to do with real cameras. However, we can do it easily with Volurama because we are simulating the cameras, and therefore we can put them any distance apart we want, and change the perception of scale in the scene for artistic effect.

#nerf #vr180 #stereoscopic #photogrammetry #filmmak