CRI:IAD Integrated Projector-Camera Modules for the Capture and Creation of Wide-Area Immersive Experiences

Principal Investigator: Henry Fuchs, Greg Welch
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Agency Number: CNS-0751187

Abstract
In the year 2000 voters in North Carolina approved the largest bond measure for higher education in the nation's history, allocating $3.1- billion for permanent infrastructure improvements to the state's public universities and community colleges. The measure was approved in all 100 counties in the state, even those that had no University of North Carolina (UNC) or community college campus. A small part of this bond money, combined with some private funds, is being used for an addition to Sitterson Hall, the home of the Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. The addition, which is scheduled to be completed in Fedbruary of 2008, will add approximately 35,000 square feet of space to the department. This includes a 35x70 foot graphics/ vision lab, dedicated primarily to wide-area virtual presence--- technologies and methods to support life-sized virtual experiences with real and virtual events and places. We are asking for Infrastructure Acquisition/Development (IAD) funds to catalyze our efforts to create a one-of-a-kind facility dedicated to wide-area virtual presence research, multidisciplinary collaborative applications, and education and outreach. Achieving wide-area virtual presence involves monumental challenges in scene/ event capture (e.g., resolution, scale, fidelity), computation (e.g., reconstruction, model management, and simulation), and display (e.g., life-size, multiple independent views, stereo, high fidelity). Specifically our team will immediately use the new facility to pursue independent but coordinated research in the following complementary areas related to virtual presence. * Wide-Area Scene/Event Capture * Real-Time Ray Tracing on Complex Datasets (Dinesh or remove?) * Summarizing and Editing Spatio-Temporal 3D Models * Multi-Person Motion Tracking/Capture * Human Motion Analysis * Multi-Person Displays * Network Adaptation * Effective Virtual Environments Beyond the core research related to wide-area virtual presence, we envision the use of this one-of-a-kind facility for multidisciplinary collaborative projects that would benefit either form the tightly- coupled capture, computation, and display infrastructure. In addition our investigators are working on research projects that would significantly benefit from individual parts of the infrastructure, such as the C/GPU computing power. Specifically our team will immediately use the new facility to pursue research in the following areas. * Surgical Training and Consultation * Replicating and Collaborating on Scientific Experiments * Visiting/Assessing the Elderly * Preserving/Exploring Archeological Sites * High Performance Computing on GPUs * Understanding Physical Motion of the Disabled * Toward Real-time Data-Driven Wave Modeling and Simulation Finally, we also intent to make use of the infrastructure for several Education and Outreach projects as follows. * Gold-Standard Wide-Area Scene/Event Data * Educational Project Courses * North Carolina Museum of Life and Science * Public Demo Days * Carolina Performing Arts