Is it possible to walk around inside a VR movie?

Imagine you can walk inside a movie shot by Steven Spielberg, or look into different parts of the scene in a detective film. This fully immersive experience is what VR is aiming to achieve and it’s known as 6 degrees of freedom.  Alex Ankhar is a computer-vision researcher at DeoVR, and he discusses this in detail in a recent article published at Medium. 

To create 6dof inside a video, VR creators require information about the geometry of the scene, to work out distance and arrangement. This can be taken from additional cameras, lidars or by using conventional VR shooting equipment.

There are many factors and variables that come into play, which require complex solutions. Alex discusses them in his article, including monocular depth estimation, binocular depth estimation, and binocular panoramas for depth estimation. To see the full explanation and diagrams of how these techniques work, click through to the article. 

Depth maps are a vital tool for scene reconstruction. The aim is to get depth data, then the images can be adjusted to remove artifacts. Or a second way to use this data is to back-project points into space to restore a 3D scene and achieve an immersive video effect. 

However, much more than simply depth maps are required for scene reconstruction, such as video inpainting and creation of a proper 3D video format suitable for streaming and corresponding VR video players. 

Alex will discuss the video impainting and streaming approaches in parts 2 and 3 of his fascinating series of articles. 

DeoVR is at the forefront of this technology and we will update you with all our major finds and achievements in this field. If you’re a skilled dev with a passion for VR and would like to work on projects like this, come and join the DeoVR team! You can find more details here.