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Real-Time Rendering of Real World Environments

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Rendering Techniques’ 99 (EGSR 1999)

Part of the book series: Eurographics ((EUROGRAPH))

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Abstract

One of the most important goals of interactive computer graphics is to allow a user to freely walk around a virtual recreation of a real environment that looks as real as the world around us. But hand-modeling such a virtual environment is inherently limited and acquiring the scene model using devices also presents challenges. Interactively rendering such a detailed model is beyond the limits of current graphics hardware, but image-based approaches can significantly improve the status quo.

We present an end-to-end system for acquiring highly detailed scans of large real world spaces, consisting of forty to eighty million range and color samples, using a digital camera and laser rangefinder. We explain successful techniques to represent these large data sets as image-based models and present contributions to image-based rendering that allow these models to be rendered in real time on existing graphics hardware without sacrificing the high resolution at which the data sets were acquired.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

    David K. McAllister, Lars Nyland, Voicu Popescu, Anselmo Lastra & Chris McCue

Authors
  1. David K. McAllister
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  2. Lars Nyland
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  3. Voicu Popescu
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  4. Anselmo Lastra
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  5. Chris McCue
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Dani Lischinski

  2. Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

    Greg Ward Larson

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© 1999 Springer-Verlag/Wien

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McAllister, D.K., Nyland, L., Popescu, V., Lastra, A., McCue, C. (1999). Real-Time Rendering of Real World Environments. In: Lischinski, D., Larson, G.W. (eds) Rendering Techniques’ 99. EGSR 1999. Eurographics. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6809-7_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-6809-7_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Vienna

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-211-83382-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-7091-6809-7

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