Date: Tue, 3 Oct 95 18:08:51 CDT From: daves (To: aama@eden.com) To: aama@eden.com Subject: Re: Video based Web pictures howdy, -just wanted to echo John's approach to Web imaging. Consumer grade video grabs are well matched to limited Web bandwiths. Shrinking the images makes them look equivalent to higher end input. Its a fantastic picture fire hose. I no longer use my 35mm SLR and can pick any image from thousands to get perfect timing and composition. No more trips to the developer and fancy photoediting is just a click away. My cheap little cam can focus so closely that I can fill the frame with my old 35mm slides; very handy. Hold off sinking bucks on a scanner. Paper photos and documents do ok with video. You may have to move close and tile images to get fine detail. Forget the expensive video lights. Household halogen floodlights give a professional looking color balance at a tenth the cost. One cool trick is to systematically point the camera in all directions then tile them into a 360 x 180 degree "texture map" which can be mapped on a sphere in a 3D environment. As such it forms the basis for a dazzling photorealistic VR. Even flat such images are very beautiful. If you've never seen the whole sky at once imagine a field of view maybe 15 times larger than normal vision. The autofocus/autoiris attends to all parts of the image in a way that conventional panoramic photography cannot. From deepest shadow to the sun itself, from your toes to straight overhead, everything is visible. If anyone wants to build such images to add to the ones on hand, I will gladly help. The idea is to create a large navigable space using video input. It takes about 40 grabs to get the whole sphere and the most time consuming task is blending out the tile edges so the final image loses the NASA Mars Lander Composited look, if desired. I should mention FaceSpace, a video based facial animation system that a group of us have been developing for several years for use in VR, games, desktop and Web interfaces, virtual theater, etc. -ds
Thanks for flying PolyCosmos.
FaceSpace has been sponsored in part by the City of Austin under the auspices of the Austin Arts Commission.