In the early 1990s, the introduction of the CAVE display, which permits a group of people to share a virtual space simultaneously, was a major milestone in the development of projective virtual environments. Since then, many researchers, including those at UNC, have developed new methods for combining projectors into large tiled displays with seamless imagery on arbitrarily shaped display surfaces. Achieving wide-area virtual presence involves monumental challenges in 3D reconstruction, model management, and simulation, as well as display. Among the applications for this work are virtual team training and telepresence.
This project creates a one-of-a-kind laboratory in the new 35,000-sq.-ft. Frederick P. Brooks Jr. Computer Science Building (part of the UNC Computer Science complex) dedicated to wide-area virtual presence research, multidisciplinary collaborative applications, and education and outreach. The researchers use the facility to pursue independent but coordinated research in the following complementary areas related to virtual presence. Samples of their work are: wide-area 4D scene/event capture in room-sized spaces that include moving humans; modeling of 3D scenes from non-uniform arrays of cameras using spatio-temporal hypervolumes;multi-person motion tracking/capture with the goal of achieving completely markerless tracking, specially of the head and limb pose; exploration of the space-time/frequency characteristics of human motion to aid in prediction and to help quantify uncertainty; wide-area, immersive, high-resolution multi-person displays; and comparison of user behavior in a virtual environment to the gold standard of user behavior in the real world, to decide what is important from a technology standpoint.
Beyond the core research related to wide-area virtual presence, the investigators use this leading-edge facility for multidisciplinary collaborative projects that benefit from the tightly coupled capture, computation, or display infrastructure. The investigators will also make use of the infrastructure for several education and outreach projects, to start developing the next generation of computer scientists.
