2 Search Results for "Sorkine-Hornung, Alexander"

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 19272 "Real VR -- Importing the Real World into Immersive VR and Optimizing the Perceptual Experience of Head-Mounted Displays". Motivated by the advent of mass-market VR headsets, this Dagstuhl Seminar addresses the scientific and engineering challenges that need to be overcome in order to experience omni-directional video recordings of the real world with the sense of stereoscopic, full-parallax immersion as can be provided by today’s head-mounted displays. Since the times of the Lumière brothers, the way we watch movies hasn’t fundamentally changed: Whether in movie theaters, on mobile devices, or on TV at home, we still experience movies as outside observers, watching the action through a "peephole" whose size is defined by the angular extent of the screen. As soon as we look away from the screen or turn around, we are immediately reminded that we are only "voyeurs" With modern full-field-of-view, head-mounted and tracked VR displays, this outside-observer paradigm of visual entertainment is quickly giving way to a fully immersive experience. Now, the action fully encompasses the viewer, drawing us in much more than was possible before. For the time being, however, current endeavors towards immersive visual entertainment are based almost entirely on 3D graphics-generated content, limiting application scenarios to purely digital, virtual worlds only. The reason is that in order to provide for stereo vision and ego-motion parallax, which are both essential for genuine visual immersion perception, the scene must be rendered in real-time from arbitrary vantage points. While this can be easily accomplished with 3D graphics via standard GPU rendering, it is not at all straight-forward to do the same from conventional video footage acquired of real-world events. Another challenge is that consumer-grade VR headsets feature spatial resolutions that are still considerably below foveal acuity, yielding a pixelated, subpar immersive viewing experience. At the same time, the visual perception characteristics of our fovea are decidedly different from our peripheral vision (as regards spatial and temporal resolution, color, contrast, clutter disambiguation etc.). So far, computer graphics research has focused almost entirely on foveal perception, even though our peripheral vision accounts for 99% of our field of view. To optimize perceived visual quality of head-mounted immersive displays, and to make optimal use of available computational resources, advanced VR rendering algorithms need to simultaneously account for our foveal and peripheral vision characteristics. The aim of the seminar was to collectively fathom what needs to be done to facilitate truly immersive viewing of real-world recordings and how to enhance the immersive viewing experience by taking perceptual aspects into account. The topic touches on research aspects from various fields, ranging from digital imaging, video processing, and computer vision to computer graphics, virtual reality, and visual perception. The seminar brought together scientists, engineers and practitioners from industry and academia to form a lasting, interdisciplinary research community who set out to jointly address the challenges of Real VR.

Forensic computing} (sometimes also called digital forensics, computer forensics or IT forensics) is a branch of forensic science pertaining to digital evidence, i.e., any legal evidence that is processed by digital computer systems or stored on digital storage media. Forensic computing is a new discipline evolving within the intersection of several established research areas such as computer science, computer engineering and law. Forensic computing is rapidly gaining importance since the amount of crime involving digital systems is steadily increasing. Furthermore, the area is still underdeveloped and poses many technical and legal challenges. This Dagstuhl seminar brought together researchers and practitioners from computer science and law covering the diverse areas of forensic computing. The goal of the seminar was to further establish forensic computing as a scientific research discipline, to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the research field, and to discuss the foundations of its methodology. The seminar was jointly organized by Prof.Dr. Felix Freiling (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany), Prof.Dr. Radim Polcák (Masaryk University, Czech Republic), Prof.Dr. Gerrit Hornung (Universität Passau, Germany). It was attended by 22 participants and its structure was based on experiences from a similar seminar in 2011 (Dagstuhl Seminar 11401).