With the advent of consumer-market Virtual Reality (VR) technology, the next revolution in visual entertainment is already on the horizon: real VR will enable us to experience live-action movies, sports broadcasts, concert videos, etc. in true visual (and aural) immersion. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the algorithms and methods that make it possible to immerse into real-world recordings. It brings together the expertise of internationally renowned experts from academia and industry who present the state of the art in this fascinating, interdisciplinary new research field. Written by and for scientists, engineers, and practitioners, this book is the definitive reference for anyone interested in finding out about how to import the real world into head-mounted displays.

While it has traditionally been seen as a means of documenting an external reality or expressing an internal feeling, photography is now capable of actualizing never-existed pasts and never-lived experiences. Thanks to the latest photographic technologies, we can now take photos in computer games, interpolate them in extended reality platforms, or synthesize them via artificial intelligence. To account for the most recent shifts in conceptualizations of photography, this book proposes the term virtual photography as a binding theoretical framework, defined as a photography that retains the efficiency and function of real photography (made with or without a camera) while manifesting these in an unfamiliar or noncustomary form.

A fascinating exploration of the history, development, and future of virtual reality, a technology with world-changing potential, written by award-winning journalist and author David Ewalt, stemming from his 2015 Forbes cover story about the Oculus Rift and its creator Palmer Luckey. You’ve heard about virtual reality, seen the new gadgets, and read about how VR will be the next big thing. But you probably haven’t yet realized the extent to which this technology will change the way we live. We used to be bound to a physical reality, but new immersive computer simulations allow us to escape our homes and bodies. Suddenly anyone can see what it’s like to stand on the peak of Mount Everest. A person who can’t walk can experience a marathon from the perspective of an Olympic champion. And why stop there? Become a dragon and fly through the universe. But it’s not only about spectacle. Virtual and augmented reality will impact nearly every aspect of our lives—commerce, medicine, politics—the applications are infinite. It may sound like science fiction, but this vision of the future drives billions of dollars in business and is a top priority for such companies as Facebook, Google, and Sony. Yet little is known about the history of these technologies. In Defying Reality, David M. Ewalt traces the story from ancient amphitheaters to Cold War military laboratories, through decades of hype and failure, to a nineteen-year-old video game aficionado who made the impossible possible. Ewalt looks at how businesses are already using this tech to revolutionize the world around us, and what we can expect in the future. Writing for a mainstream audience as well as for technology enthusiasts, Ewalt offers a unique perspective on VR. With firsthand accounts and on-the-ground reporting, Defying Reality shows how virtual reality will change our work, our play, and the way we relate to one another.

The 2-volume set LNCS 12242 and 12243 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Computer Graphics, AVR 2020, held in Lecce, Italy, in September 2020.* The 45 full papers and 14 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 99 submissions. The papers discuss key issues, approaches, ideas, open problems, innovative applications and trends in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, 3D reconstruction visualization, and applications in the areas of cultural heritage, medicine, education, and industry. * The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

With reference to traditional film theory and frameworks drawn from fields such as screenwriting studies and anthropology, this book explores the challenges and opportunities for both practitioners and viewers offered by the 360-degree storytelling form. It focuses on cinematic virtual reality (CVR), a format that involves immersive, high quality, live action or computer-generated imagery (CGI) that can be viewed through head mounted display (HMD) goggles or via online platforms such as YouTube. This format has surged in popularity in recent years due to the release of affordable high quality omnidirectional (360-degree) cameras and consumer grade HMDs. The book interrogates four key concepts for this emerging medium: immersion, presence, embodiment and proximity through an analysis of innovative case studies and with reference to practitioner interviews. In doing so, it highlights the specificity of the format and provides a critical account of practitioner approaches to the concept development, writing and realisation of short narrative CVR works. The book concludes with an account of the author’s practice-led research into the form, providing a valuable example of creative practice in the field of immersive media.

The excellently received call for papers of the 13th Scandinavian Conference on Image Analysis, June 29-July 2 (SCIA 2003) resulted in the selected articles of this proceedings. Additionally the volume also contains invited contributions from - Ivar Austvoll, Stavanger University College (NO), - Lars B? a? ath, Halmstad University (SE), - Ewert Bengtsson, Uppsala University (SE), - Rasmus Larsen, Technical University of Denmark (DK), - Jussi Parkkinen, University of Joensuu (FI), - Pietro Perona, California Institute of Technology (US) which brings the total number of articles to 152. The theme of the papers are dominated by the categories - Feature extraction - Depth and surface - Medical image processing - Shape analysis - Segmentation and spatial grouping - Coding and representation - Motion analysis - Texture analysis - Color analysis - Indexing and categorization which also represent the topical groupings of this book. The particularly strong response to the feature extraction, depth and surface, and medical image processing themes makes us believe that these areas are c- rently expansive, partly because of the rich set of problems which remain to be addressed.

papers, illustrated with examples. They include wavelet bases, implicit functions de ned on a space grid, etc. It appears that a common pattern is the recovery of a controllable model of the scene, such that the resulting images can be edited (interaction). Changing the viewpoint is only one (important) aspect, but changing the lighting and action is equally important [2]. Recording and representing three-dimensional scenes is an emerging technology made possible by the convergence of optics, geometry and computer science, with many applications in the movie industry, and more generally in entertainment. Note that the invention of cinema (camera and projector) was also primarily a scienti c invention that evolved into an art form. We suspect the same thing will probably happen with 3-D movies. 3 Book Contents The book is composed of 12 chapters, which elaborate on the content of talks given at the BANFF workshop. The chapters are organized into three sections. The rst section presents an overview of the inter-relations between the art of cinemat- raphy and the science of image and geometry processing; the second section is devoted to recent developments in geometry; and the third section is devoted to recent developmentsin image processing. 3.1 3-D Cinematography and Applications The rst section of the book presents an overview of the inter-relations between the art of cinematography and the science of image and geometry processing.