From Real to Virtual: An Image-Based Rendering Toolkit to Help Bring the World Around Us Into Virtual Reality

International audienceThe release of consumer-grade head-mounted displays has helped bring virtual reality (VR) to our homes, cultural sites, and workplaces, increasingly making it a part of our everyday lives. In response, many content creators have expressed renewed interest in bringing the people, objects, and places of our daily lives into VR, helping push the boundaries of our ability to transform photographs of everyday real-world scenes into convincing VR assets. In this paper, we present an open-source solution we developed in the Unity game engine as a way to make this image-based approach to virtual reality simple and accessible to all, to encourage content creators of all kinds to capture and render the world around them in VR. We start by presenting the use cases of image-based virtual reality, from which we discuss the motivations that led us to work on our solution. We then provide details on the development of the toolkit, specifically discussing our implementation of several image-based rendering (IBR) methods. Finally, we present the results of a preliminary user study focused on interface usability and rendering quality, and discuss paths for future work