Real-time rendering of real world environments

  • Authors:
  • David K. McAllister;Lars Nyland;Voicu Popescu;Anselmo Lastra;Chris McCue

  • Affiliations:
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Computer Science;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Computer Science;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Computer Science;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Computer Science;University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Computer Science

  • Venue:
  • EGWR'99 Proceedings of the 10th Eurographics conference on Rendering
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

One of the most important goals of interactive computer graphics is to allow a user to freely walk around a virtual recreation of a real environment that looks as real as the world around us. But hand-modeling such a virtual environment is inherently limited and acquiring the scene model using devices also presents challenges. Interactively rendering such a detailed model is beyond the limits of current graphics hardware, but image-based approaches can significantly improve the status quo. We present an end-to-end system for acquiring highly detailed scans of large real world spaces, consisting of forty to eighty million range and color samples, using a digital camera and laser rangefinder. We explain successful techniques to represent these large data sets as image-based models and present contributions to image-based rendering that allow these models to be rendered in real time on existing graphics hardware without sacrificing the high resolution at which the data sets were acquired.