3D TV: A Scalable System for Real-Time Acquisition, Transmission, and Autostereoscopic Display of Dynamic Scenes

Three-dimensional TV is expected to be the next revolution in the history of television. We implemented a 3D TV prototype system with real-time acquisition, transmission, and 3D display of dynamic scenes. We developed a distributed, scalable architecture to manage the high computation and bandwidth demands. Our system consists of an array of cameras, clusters of network-connected PCs, and a multi-projector 3D display. Multiple video streams are individually encoded and sent over a broadband network to the display. The 3D display shows high-resolution (1024 × 768) stereoscopic color images for multiple viewpoints without special glasses. We implemented systems with rear-projection and front-projection lenticular screens. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview of our 3D TV system, including an examination of design choices and tradeoffs. We present the calibration and image alignment procedures that are necessary to achieve good image quality. We present qualitative results and some early user feedback. We believe this is the first real-time end-to-end 3D TV system with enough views and resolution to provide a truly immersive 3D experience.Engineering and Applied Science

Computational Light Routing: 3D Printed Optical Fibers for Sensing and Display

Despite recent interest in digital fabrication, there are still few algorithms that provide control over how light propagates inside a solid object. Existing methods either work only on the surface or restrict themselves to light diffusion in volumes. We use multi-material 3D printing to fabricate objects with embedded optical fibers, exploiting total internal reflection to guide light inside an object. We introduce automatic fiber design algorithms together with new manufacturing techniques to route light between two arbitrary surfaces. Our implicit algorithm optimizes light transmission by minimizing fiber curvature and maximizing fiber separation while respecting constraints such as fiber arrival angle. We also discuss the influence of different printable materials and fiber geometry on light propagation in the volume and the light angular distribution when exiting the fiber. Our methods enable new applications such as surface displays of arbitrary shape, touch-based painting of surfaces, and sensing a hemispherical light distribution in a single shot.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-1012147)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS-1116296)United States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Grant N66001-12-1-4242)Intel Corporation (Science and Technology Center for Visual Computing)Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan Research Fellowship

Medial Skeletal Diagram: A Generalized Medial Axis Approach for Compact 3D Shape Representation

We propose the Medial Skeletal Diagram, a novel skeletal representation that tackles the prevailing issues around compactness and reconstruction accuracy in existing skeletal representations. Our approach augments the continuous elements in the medial axis representation to effectively shift the complexity away from discrete elements. To that end, we introduce generalized enveloping primitives, an enhancement of the standard primitives in medial axis, which ensures efficient coverage of intricate local features of the input shape and substantially reduces the number of discrete elements required. Moreover, we present a computational framework that constructs a medial skeletal diagram from an arbitrary closed manifold mesh. Our optimization pipeline ensures that the resulting medial skeletal diagram comprehensively covers the input shape with the fewest primitives. Additionally, each optimized primitive undergoes a post-refinement process to guarantee an accurate match with the source mesh in both geometry and tessellation. We validate our approach on a comprehensive benchmark of 100 shapes, demonstrating its compactness of the discrete elements and superior reconstruction accuracy across a variety of cases. Furthermore, we exemplify the versatility of our representation in downstream applications such as shape optimization, shape generation, mesh decomposition, mesh alignment, mesh compression, and user-interactive design.Comment: 22 pages, 28 figure

Fab forms: customizable objects for fabrication with validity and geometry caching

We address the problem of allowing casual users to customize parametric models while maintaining their valid state as 3D-printable functional objects. We define Fab Form as any design representation that lends itself to interactive customization by a novice user, while remaining valid and manufacturable. We propose a method to achieve these Fab Form requirements for general parametric designs tagged with a general set of automated validity tests and a small number of parameters exposed to the casual user. Our solution separates Fab Form evaluation into a precomputation stage and a runtime stage. Parts of the geometry and design validity (such as manufacturability) are evaluated and stored in the precomputation stage by adaptively sampling the design space. At runtime the remainder of the evaluation is performed. This allows interactive navigation in the valid regions of the design space using an automatically generated Web user interface (UI). We evaluate our approach by converting several parametric models into corresponding Fab Forms.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1138967

Ergonomic-Centric Holography: Optimizing Realism,Immersion, and Comfort for Holographic Display

We introduce ergonomic-centric holography, an algorithmic framework that simultaneously optimizes for realistic incoherent defocus, unrestricted pupil movements in the eye box, and high-order diffractions for filtering-free holography. The proposed method outperforms prior algorithms on holographic display prototypes operating in unfiltered and pupil-mimicking modes, offering the potential to enhance next-generation virtual and augmented reality experiences

Efficient Isotropic BRDF Measurement

In this paper we present novel reflectance measurement procedures that require fewer total measurements than standard uniform sampling approaches. First, we acquire densely sampled reflectance data for a large collection of different materials. Using these densely sampled measurements we analyze the general surface reflectance function to determine the local signal variation at each point in the function's domain. We then use wavelet analysis to derive a common basis for all of the acquired reflectance functions as well as a corresponding non-uniform sampling pattern that corresponds to all non-zero wavelet coefficients. Second, we show that the reflectance of an arbitrary material can be represented as a linear combination of the surface reflectance functions. Furthermore, our analysis provides a reduced set of sampling points that permits us to robustly estimate the coefficients of this linear combination. These procedures dramatically shorten the acquisition time for isotropic reflectance measurements. We present a detailed description and analysis of our measurement approaches and sampling strategies.Engineering and Applied Science