by Kevin Walker
1999
A room filled with projections, computer screens, piped-in sound -- is it the real world or the virtual world? How about walking around with a wearable computer with a retina-projection monitor? Questioning reality was the theme of this, the last SIGGRAPH '99 panel. Various terms were bandied about -- mixed reality, augmented reality, even the trademarked "virtualized reality." Henry Fuchs, a well-known researcher in this area, showed an "office of the future," with projections covering the walls, fed by real-time 3D digitizations of the room and its occupants. The effect is like the walls have fallen away to reveal a 3D information space. Fuchs said that many of his fellow researchers (at UNC Chapel Hill) have taken to using projections in place of their monitors.
A more interesting application was by Takeo Canade of Carnegie Mellon. You've seen video capture, you've seen motion capture, you've seen 3D digitization; but have you ever seen all of these things combined? He's developed a dome filled with cameras and sensors, with all surfaces painted blue, in which they capture the video, 3D and motion data of whole scenes. The example shown was a two-on-two basketball game, which was digitized and placed in a 3D scene. You know how in "The Matrix" (and Gap commercials) where the action freezes and they pan around a scene? Well, with this system you could take any viewpoint (even the ball's), without freezing the action. He didn't show the details of how it was done, probably because he's going to make a fortune selling his Virtualized Reality