This impressive virtual reality recreation of Mad Max: Fury Road is extrapolated entirely from frames on a Blu-Ray disc, opening up the possibility for a new sub genre of homebrew VR experiences.
Photogrammetry is the process of capturing objects or environments for mapping to 3D environments, essentially taking static data plus depth information to recreate a real world object or place. But what if the subject of the capture exists only within a copy of a movie?
A user on Oculus’ forums, recently posted some tests he’d conducted, creating 3D, VR scenes to run on his recently acquired Oculus Rift DK2. ‘mhuovinen’ works from a Blu-ray source of his favourite movies, capturing staccato snapshots of the movie scene in motion, then extrapolating 3D environments and characters from those captured frames.
“The set models are constructed mostly from single tracking shots, using every 10th frame or so,” says the artist behind the project, “The processing time depends on the number of frames used, but in these scenes it was usually less than 10 minutes. Sometimes you have to manually mask out actors and other moving stuff from the footage which can be the most time consuming part of the process.”
As ever though, human beings pose the biggest problem for the process. “The actor heads were bit trickier to capture. Some were constructed from tracking shots but mostly I used shots where the actors turn their head and masked out the rest of the body.”
The developer has also turned his attention to other scenes from famous movies. Kubricks 2001: A Space Oddyssey is also given the treatment with surprisingly impressive results.
Find out more about the developer and his techniques over at the Oculus forums here.