In the last few years, virtual reality head mounted displays (VR HMDs) have seen an explosion of consumer interest. However, virtual content that utilizes the capabilities of these new HMDs is still rather scant. In this thesis, we present a streamlined application that allows users to virtually navigate through photorealistic rendered 3D scenes that were captured by a human-operated backpack system. Our app provides users the ability to look around captured 360-degree panoramas by orienting their headsets, traverse between panoramas by selecting target destinations, visualize normal and depth data by controlling a pancake cursor, and take distance measurements among any two points in space. We discuss the various technical challenges of building the first web-based VR app compatible with the Android-based Daydream VR headset and controller. We also outline techniques for monitoring and optimizing the performance of our web-based VR app, which allowed us to achieve a 5x increase in framerate over our original naive implementation.
Title
Virtual Walkthrough of 3D Captured Scenes in Web-based Virtual Reality
Published
2017-01-09
Full Collection Name
Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences Technical Reports
Other Identifiers
EECS-2017-1
Type
Text
Extent
23 p
Archive
The Engineering Library
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