Google working with light fields
Google has been working with virtual reality for some time now, since their original release of Google Cardboard in 2014. They’ve developed multiple headsets with the Google Daydream and Cardboard, they’ve developed VR cameras, and both “Tilt Brush” and “Earth VR.”
In a blog post the company put out on March 14, 2018, they say, “to create the most realistic sense of presence, what we show in VR needs to be as close as possible to what’d you see if you were really there… To help create this more realistic sense of presence in VR, we’ve been experimenting with light fields.”
In simple terms, light fields are a set of complex and advanced equations that are responsible for determining how much light is flowing in every direction in any given space. That is unbelievable over-simplified, but it establishes what Google is doing with them.
They are using light fields to create a more realistic rendering of virtual reality. The equations help stitch together images to give this more realistic feel.
The company modified a GoPro Odyssey Jump camera by bending it into an arc of 16 cameras that rotates on its horizontal axis. Objects that are closer to you in real life will shift more when you move your head and farther away ones will shift less. This is the kind of effect that Google is going for with this work.
Images have been taken at the “Gamble House” in Pasadena, California, the “Mosaic Tile House” in Venice, California, St. Stephen’s Church in Granada Hills, California and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Their process consists of sampling the light from the camera positions as the camera circles the room. This data is “aligned and compressed in a custom dataset file that’s read by special rendering software we’ve implemented as a plug-in for the Unity game engine,” according to the blog post.
Google also released “Welcome to Light Fields” on Steam VR for users to look at all of the images that the company has taken and give feedback on them.
