To feel truly immersed in virtual reality, one needs to be able to freely look around within a virtual environment and see it from the viewpoints of one’s own eyes. Immersion requires ‘freedom of motion’ in six degrees-of-freedom (‘6-DoF’), so that viewers see the correct views of an environment. As viewers move their heads, the objects they see should move relative to each other, with different speeds depending on their distance to the viewer. This is called motion parallax and is a vital depth cue for the human visual system that is entirely missing from existing 360° VR video.
To achieve 6-DoF VR video that enables photorealistic exploration of dynamic real environments in 360° virtual reality, this project will develop novel video-based capture, 3D reconstruction and rendering techniques. We first explore different approaches for capturing static and dynamic 360° environments, which are more challenging, including using 360° cameras and multi-camera rigs. We have started with 6-DoF 360° VR photographs (i.e. static scenes) and want to extend our approach to 6-DoF VR videos.
The main focus of this job is to research and develop novel algorithms for reconstructing the 3D geometry of the environments from the captured imagery by extending multi-view geometry/photogrammetry techniques to handle dynamic 360° environments. Extending image-based rendering to 360° environments will then enable 6-DoF motion within a photorealistic 360° environment with high visual fidelity, and will result in detailed 360° environments covering all possible viewing directions.
Our aim is to publish the resulting research and results in leading computer vision and computer graphics venues, specifically CVPR/ICCV/ECCV, IJCV and/or SIGGRAPH (Asia)/Transactions on Graphics.
You will join the vibrant Visual Computing group at Bath, which comprises 30 doctoral students, 5 post-doctoral researchers, 2 research software engineers and 11 academics, and presents many opportunities for collaborative work and shared publications.
This role is offered on a fixed-term contract until 24 June 2021.
Informal enquiries should be directed to Dr Christian Richardt (c.richardt@bath.ac.uk), however, please ensure that your application is submitted via the University website.
Closing Date: 30 Apr 2020
Type: Education & Research
