Damn, it’s about time!

Damn, it’s about time to finally have a single post on the great researchers and programmers from Suomi! The VTT Team does a lot of impressive work with Augmented Reality. They currently focus on architecture AR and interieur planning as well as industrial applications and now also starting mobile solutions. They started off in 2000 with virtual ads for live broadcast TV. Moving on to more entertainment and game applications.

Their youtube channel shows some neat demos I also wanted to share (e.g. the architecture previz on location), but as the new video went online yesterday, I thought: Damn! This is cool! So I’ll focus on the single video here for you to enjoy!

Let’s quote their own description:

Photorealistic rendering for Augmented reality. Uses soft shadows, indirect lighting and image quality matching. Various materials like glass, chrome or plastic are possible. Lighting is automatically determined from a ping pong ball.

The matching is pretty advanced and though we’ve seen real light influence before, the demo looks amazingly realistic taking the information from a simple ping pong ball for the least hardware overhead (only one camera needed). Prettiest part is the refraction on translucent objects, where you can see the background tracing through. Usually we’d take a spherical camera for capturing environment information. Here they plausible-fake it by using the single background frame they acquire anyway. The ray-trace for translucent objects and intersect with a virtual plane (at marker height) to pick the underlying texel from the video frame. If they shoot outside the image plane, they will use mirrored and repeated textures from the single video image. Due to their good material models including BRDFs (won’t get started here) and a real-time post processor, we get these result to enjoy. So, if you don’t care for the technological mumble jumble: just watch it, it looks absolutely stunning.

Have a nice weekend! Great work, VTT! :-)