One of the goals of computer graphics and a focus in virtual reality have been to provide interactive viewing capabilities, fly-throughs and walk-throughs, of actual environments using digital models. We present an 3D digital video system that attempts to provide the same capabilities for actual events and actions containing people in performances such as dancing. The novel feature of this system is that it encapsulates the dynamics of real events in 3D graphics, hence allowing photorealistic interactive playback from arbitrary viewpoints. This system utilizes video streams of a given scene from multiple perspectives and employs volume occupancy method to recover the object shape. Then the high-speed graphics workstation hardware is used to accurately determine the colors of the model using all available camera views, resulting in an accurate 3D recreation of the original dynamic scene. We describe the components of our system in detail and present a 3D digital sequence of a karate performance.

Readers many contact Moezzi at the Visual Computing Laboratory, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0407, e-mail moezzi@ece.ucsd.edu.