For those that missed it, please watch the recorded talk here: https://youtu.be/Da7Lqelk3ng
Abstract: This talk will present a range of work conducted at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Google VR while working to develop novel methods for recording and rendering photorealistic actors and environments for movies, games, and virtual reality. One such novel development is the Light Stage facial scanning system, a system of geodesic spheres of inward-pointing LED lights which have been used to help create digital actors based on real people in movies such as Avatar, Benjamin Button, Maleficent, Furious 7, Blade Runner: 2049, and Ready Player One. Light Stages can also reproduce recorded omnidirectional lighting environments and have recently been outfitted with multispectral LED lights to accurately mimic the color rendition properties of daylight, incandescent, and mixed lighting environments. Our full-body Light Stage 6 system was used with natural language processing and an automultiscopic projector array to record and project interactive hologram-like conversations with survivors of the Holocaust. I will conclude the talk by presenting Google VR's "Welcome to Light Fields", the first downloadable virtual reality light field experience which records and displays 360-degree photographic environments. This allows users to move inside the environment of with six degrees of freedom, creating a far more comfortable and immersive VR experience.
Bio: Paul Debevec is a Senior Scientist at Google VR and an adjunct research professor at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles. Paul a graduate of Urbana's University High School received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1996, where his thesis presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal architectural models from photographs. Using Façade he led the creation of virtual cinematography of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film The Campanile Movie whose techniques were used to create virtual backgrounds in The Matrix. Debevec pioneered high dynamic range image-based lighting techniques. At USC ICT, he continued the development of Light Stage devices for recording geometry and appearance and helped create new 3D Display devices for telepresence and teleconferencing. His work has received two Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievement, the SMPTE Progress Medal, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award. http://www.debevec.org/
