Sharing Reality: Holographic Photography

by Dr. Roderick O’Hara, Ollie Rankin and Sebastian Marino

Last week we released our “Holographic Photography Demo” on Valve’s Steam Store for the HTC VIVE. In doing so, we asked the question “have you ever wanted to step into a photograph?”, let us explain…

What does ‘Holographic Photography’ mean?

Holographic photography lets anyone with a prosumer camera— or even smartphone — take a simple series of ordinary photographs and convert them into a 3D panoramic scene that’s suitable for viewing in VR. But — and here’s what makes it unique — this is a panorama with true scale, depth and parallax. So, when we say ‘step into a photograph’, we mean it literally. By using a VR device with positional head-tracking you can move from side-to-side and back-and-forth, changing your perspective, accordingly.

In this video blog, the reviewer — who’s not associated with us — is constantly at a loss to explain what it is that makes our demo so much more transportive than other panoramic experiences he’s seen before. “It looks like it’s right there,” he says, “you really feel like you’re standing right there”. What is it that makes our illusion so much more real than anything he’s seen before? What aspect of the experience is tricking him into believing he’s “right there”? It’s parallax — the way foreground objects appear to slide more quickly against background objects when you move your head — something that has never been available before in a photographic VR experience, until now.

Stereo panoramic photography — such as Facebook 360 video — has no way of representing the size of objects or the spatial relationships between the viewer and their surroundings, but by creating a three dimensional environment, at real-world scale, we’re able give the viewer the sense of presence that is fundamentally missing from 360 degree panoramic experiences. The following video depicts the holographic photography creation process: from a collection of photographs, through to a spherical projection and finally to a three dimensional model of the environment — we then view it in VR, on a HTC VIVE with positional head-tracking, demonstrating the scene’s parallax:

Holographic photography has quickly become an obsession within our team. We just can’t stop playing with it — even our CFO is out taking pictures, and our significant others, too. We’ve had to remind ourselves that going out to find iconic old buildings or exotic new locations to capture and share with each other is not always our top priority. We thought of this ‘demo’ originally as a milestone on our roadmap to something much bigger and more challenging, rather than something we would release on its own merit. Once we started showing the results to people, though, it became clear that there was more excitement around the technology than we had anticipated and it deserved to be shared — imperfections and all.

While static photogrammetry is hardly new, our toolset introduces some novel capabilities that make it possible for anyone, with almost any camera, to create photographic experiences for VR. Capturing a scene using traditional photogrammetry software requires the user to take many hundreds or thousands of photographs, each from a different position. This can be slow, difficult, and often doesn’t yield good results. Our process only requires 20 to 30 shots captured from one standing position, as with the panorama mode on a smartphone, and we can easily capture anything from wide open landscapes to city streets without complicated setup or editing by the user.

We think the technology has immediate value for education, tourism, real estate, construction and many other endeavors. This demo is the beginning of a conversation around a novel technology, rather than a fully-fledged product, and we’re excited to be able to start offering it to our partners, new and old, in addition to our existing volumetric performance capture technology.

Holographic photography is an indication of our future trajectory as a company; another step towards capturing the reality around us; people, places and all manner of events, in their entirety and complexity. We’re particularly inspired by applications in the field of education, and the potential to introduce people to new ideas and experiences in a much deeper and more authentic way.

You can freely download our “Holographic Photography Demo”, for HTC VIVE, on Steam by following this link: