Capturing Visual Experiences
Brian Curless · 2006
Why do we take pictures and videos? Often, the answer is that we hope to capture moments in time, so that we can later recall and savor them once again. Digital cameras and camcorders are making it ever easier to record these moments, but often, something is lost. Photographs freeze time and space, losing the sense of motion in a scene and losing the freedom of motion available to the original viewer, and video is usually of lower resolution and finite duration, and still gives up viewpoint freedom. Furthermore, the task of sorting through the reams of image and video data that an individual records is becoming simply burdensome. In this talk, I will describe research aimed at helping the user to better capture and re-experience the moment. One approach is to build complex hardware to acquire an immersive representation of the scene, allowing virtual flythroughs and the like. The work I will describe is far less heavyhanded – it is based on handfuls of images and simple video captures and