Computer Graphics
TU Braunschweig

Immersive Digital Reality

Abstract

Motivated by the advent of mass-market head-mounted immersive displays, we set out to pioneer the technology needed to experience recordings of the real world with the sense of full immersion as provided by VR goggles.


Immersive Digital Reality

a DFG Reinhart Koselleck Project (2016-2023)


Project Summary

Motivated by the advent of mass-market head-mounted immersive displays, we set out to pioneer the technology needed to experience recordings of the real world with the sense of full immersion as provided by VR goggles. To achieve this goal, a number of interdisciplinary, tightly interrelated challenges from video processing, computer graphics, computer vision, and applied visual perception need to be addressed concertedly. By importing the real world into immersive displays, we want to lay the foundations for the way we may watch movies in the future, leaving fixed-viewpoint, limited field-of-view screens behind for a completely immersive, collective experience.

Researchers

Susana Castillo

Colin Groth

Florian Hahlbohm

Moritz Kappel

Jan-Philipp Tauscher

Visiting Researchers

Tobias Bertel (University of Bath, UK)

Preeti Gopal (IIT Bombay, India)

Alumni

Moritz Mühlhausen

Marc Kassubeck

Steve Grogorick

Thiemo Alldieck

Leslie Woehler

Matthias Überheide

Michael Stengel

Job Openings

We are always looking for excellent researchers. Want to join the project?

Events

September 27-29, 2023

International Symposium on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization (VMV) at TU Braunschweig (Organizer)

March 16, 2022

Our work on Omnidirectional Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation in Virtual Reality presented at IEEE VR has won honorable mention for Best Journal Track Paper

August 2021

Publication of our guest-edited CGAA special issue on Real VR

December 10, 2020

CfP submission deadline for our CGAA special issue on Real VR (Guest Editor)

February 28, 2020

Publication of our Springer book on Real VR (Editor)

June 30-July 3, 2019

Real VR - Importing the Real World into Immersive VR and Optimizing the Perceptual Experience of Head-Mounted Displays, Dagstuhl Seminar 19272 (Organizer)

April 24-26, 2019

Computational Visual Media Conference in Bath, UK (Program Co-Chair)

June 7-8, 2017

Symposium on Visual Computing and Perception (SVCP) at TU Braunschweig (Organizer)

Invited Guest Lectures

September 18, 2019Tobias Bertel (Univ. Bath, UK): Creating Real VR Experiences
August 19, 2019Claudia Menzel (Universität Landau): How much “nature” is in the image? The role of lower-level processed image properties on the processing and evaluation of faces, artworks, and environments
April 12, 2019
Sebastian Bosse (FhG-HHI Berlin): Data-driven estimation and neuro-physiological assessment of perceived visual quality
October 19, 2018
Susana Castillo (BTU Cottbus): Digital Personality and the Emotional Onion
April 16, 2018Katharina Legde (BTU Cottbus): Human-ness of Virtual Agents
July 10, 2017Gerard Pons-Moll (MPI Informatik): Real Virtual Humans
June 7-8, 2017

Symposium on Visual Computing and Perception (SVCP)

  • Jan Koenderink (KU Leuven, TU Delft): Construction of the mirror-world
  • Erik Reinhard (Technicolor): High dynamic range imaging: a soon-to-be-successful example of industry adption
  • Bernt Schiele (MPI Informatik): Computer Vision: Progress in the last decade and open problems
  • Heinrich Bülthoff (MPI Biological Cybernetics): Perceptual Graphics: closing the loop between Perception, Graphics and Computer Vision
  • Holger Theisel (Univ. Magdeburg): Perceptually Optimal Curves and Surfaces for Flow Visualization
  • Michael Bach (Univ. Freiburg): Imaging in our brain- optical illusions neither ``trick the eye'' nor ``fool the brain''
May 12, 2017

Marcus Riemer (FH Wedel): Einsatz der Unity-Engine in VR-Umgebungen (in German)

Invited Talks

August 18, 2023

Invited talk in the SCIEN Colloquium, Stanford University, USA

August 14, 2023

Invited talk at NVIDIA Inc., Santa Clara, CA: "Turning Natural Reality into Virtual Reality"

January 17, 2020

Invited talk by Thiemo Alldieck at Carnegie Mellon University, USA: "Reconstructing 3D Human Avatars from Monocular Images"

October 10, 2019

Invited talk at DLR Braunschweig "What’s missing in Head-mounted VR Displays?"

April 26, 2019

Invited talk by Thiemo Alldieck at TU Tampere, Finland: "Tell Me How You Look and I'll Tell You How You Move"

November 30, 2018

Invited talk at FhG Heinrich Hertz Institut Berlin "Turning Reality into Virtual Reality"

January 12, 2018

Keynote presentation at VR Walkthrough Technology Day, TU Tampere, Finland (presentation video)

April 20, 2017

Invited talk at Stanford Computer Graphics Lab (GCafe), Stanford University, USA 

January 23, 2017

Invited talk at University of Konstanz/SFB TRR 161: "Visual Computing - Bridging Real and Digital Domain"

In the News

June 22, 2022

Article in TU Magazine about our research on galvanic vestibular stimulation to counter cybersickness

Mai 16, 2022

Our immersive 360º fulldome multiplayer game "Space Challenge" we developed with our students Jonas Penshorn, Niklas Mainzer und Johannes Weinert has been released in the Planetarium Wolfsburg. Braunschweiger Zeitung, Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, Wolfsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, Regional Heute

June 11, 2021

Our ICG Dome makes a prominent appearance in this year's TU Nights - Lost Places (website)

January 1, 2021

Our ICG Dome is picture of the month of our university's research magazine

November 24, 2020

Article on our collaboration with Planetarium Wolfsburg (in German)

March 23, 2018

Interview in the local newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung (in German)

November 10, 2017

Article in local chamber of commerce magazine standort 38 (in German)

June 8, 2017

Radio FFN coverage (mp3)

May 4, 2016

Articles in the local newspaper Braunschweiger Zeitung. TU Research Magazine, and news38.de (in German).

 

Publications

Moritz Kappel, Florian Hahlbohm, Timon Scholz, Susana Castillo, Christian Theobalt, Martin Eisemann, Vladislav Golyanik, Marcus Magnor:
D-NPC: Dynamic Neural Point Clouds for Non-Rigid View Synthesis from Monocular Video
arXiv preprint, pp. 1-16, June 2024.





Colin Groth, Sascha Fricke, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Wavelet-Based Fast Decoding of 360° Videos
in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG, Proc. IEEE VR), IEEE , pp. 1-9, February 2023.

Moritz Kappel, Vladislav Golyanik, Susana Castillo, Christian Theobalt, Marcus Magnor:
Fast Non-Rigid Radiance Fields from Monocularized Data
arXiv preprint, to appear.
url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01368

Leslie Wöhler, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Personality Analysis of Face Swaps: Can They be Used as Avatars?
in ACM Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, no. 14, ACM, pp. 1-8, September 2022.

Colin Groth, Jan-Philipp Tauscher, Nikkel Heesen, Max Hattenbach, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Omnidirectional Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation in Virtual Reality
in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG, Proc. IEEE VR), vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 2234-2244, March 2022.
Won "Honorable Mention for Best Journal Track Paper" at IEEE VR

Marcus Magnor, Susana Castillo, Alexander Sorkine-Hornung (Eds.):
Real VR - special issue of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 41, no. 4, IEEE, August 2021.


Leslie Wöhler, Martin Zembaty, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Towards Understanding Perceptual Differences between Genuine and Face-Swapped Videos
in Proc. ACM Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), no. 240, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1-13, May 2021.

Colin Groth, Jan-Philipp Tauscher, Nikkel Heesen, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Visual Techniques to Reduce Cybersickness in Virtual Reality
in Proc. IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), IEEE, pp. 486-487, March 2021.

Colin Groth, Jan-Philipp Tauscher, Nikkel Heesen, Steve Grogorick, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Mitigation of Cybersickness in Immersive 360° Videos
in IEEE Virtual Reality Workshop on Immersive Sickness Prevention (WISP), IEEE, pp. 169-177, March 2021.


Colin Groth, Jan-Philipp Tauscher, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Altering the Conveyed Facial Emotion Through Automatic Reenactment of Video Portraits
in Proc. International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA), vol. 1300, Springer, Cham, pp. 128-135, November 2020.

Leslie Wöhler, Jann-Ole Henningson, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
PEFS: A Validated Dataset for Perceptual Experiments on Face Swap Portrait Videos
in Proc. International Conference on Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA), vol. 1300, Springer, Cham, pp. 120-127, November 2020.

Moritz Mühlhausen, Moritz Kappel, Marc Kassubeck, Paul Maximilian Bittner, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Temporal Consistent Motion Parallax for Omnidirectional Stereo Panorama Video
in ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST), no. 21, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 1-9, November 2020.


Jan-Philipp Tauscher, Alexandra Witt, Sebastian Bosse, Fabian Wolf Schottky, Steve Grogorick, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Exploring Neural and Peripheral Physiological Correlates of Simulator Sickness
in Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, vol. 31, no. 4-5, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., pp. e1953 ff., August 2020.
electronic ISSN: 1546-427X



Thiemo Alldieck, Moritz Kappel, Susana Castillo, Marcus Magnor:
Reconstructing 3D Human Avatars from Monocular Images
in Magnor M., Sorkine-Hornung A. (Eds.): Real VR – Immersive Digital Reality: How to Import the Real World into Head-Mounted Immersive Displays, Springer International Publishing, Cham, ISBN 978-3-030-41816-8, pp. 188-218, March 2020.

Moritz Mühlhausen, Marcus Magnor:
Multiview Panorama Alignment and Optical Flow Refinement
in Magnor M., Sorkine-Hornung A. (Eds.): Real VR – Immersive Digital Reality: How to Import the Real World into Head-Mounted Immersive Displays, Springer International Publishing, Cham, ISBN 978-3-030-41816-8, pp. 96-108, March 2020.

Steve Grogorick, Marcus Magnor:
Subtle Visual Attention Guidance in VR
in Magnor M., Sorkine-Hornung A. (Eds.): Real VR – Immersive Digital Reality: How to Import the Real World into Head-Mounted Immersive Displays, Springer International Publishing, Cham, ISBN 978-3-030-41816-8, pp. 272-284, March 2020.

Marcus Magnor, Alexander Sorkine-Hornung (Eds.):
Real VR - Importing the Real World into Immersive VR and Optimizing the Perceptual Experience of Head-Mounted Displays
Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, ISBN 2192-5283, pp. 143-156, November 2019.
Dagstuhl Seminar 19272

Marcus Magnor:
From Reality to Immersive VR: What’s missing in VR?
Dagstuhl Reports @ Dagstuhl Seminar 2019, p. 151, November 2019.
Dagstuhl Seminar 19272







Steve Grogorick, Georgia Albuquerque, Marcus Magnor:
Comparing Unobtrusive Gaze Guiding Stimuli in Head-mounted Displays
in Proc. IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), IEEE, October 2018.




Jan-Philipp Tauscher, Fabian Wolf Schottky, Steve Grogorick, Marcus Magnor, Maryam Mustafa:
Analysis of Neural Correlates of Saccadic Eye Movements
in Proc. ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP), no. 17, ACM, pp. 17:1-17:9, August 2018.

Tilak Varisetty, Markus Fidler, Matthias Überheide, Marcus Magnor:
On the Delay Performance of Browser-based Interactive TCP Free-viewpoint Streaming
in Proc. IFIP Networking 2018 Conference (NETWORKING 2018), IEEE, pp. 1-9, July 2018.

Thiemo Alldieck, Marcus Magnor, Weipeng Xu, Christian Theobalt, Gerard Pons-Moll:
Video Based Reconstruction of 3D People Models
in IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE, pp. 8387-8397, June 2018.
CVPR Spotlight Paper


Moritz Mühlhausen, Matthias Überheide, Leslie Wöhler, Marc Kassubeck, Marcus Magnor:
Automatic Upright Alignment of Multi-View Spherical Panoramas
Poster @ European Conference on Visual Media Production 2017, December 2017.
Best Student Poster Award

Steve Grogorick, Michael Stengel, Elmar Eisemann, Marcus Magnor:
Subtle Gaze Guidance for Immersive Environments
in Proc. ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP), ACM, pp. 4:1-4:7, September 2017.


Thiemo Alldieck, Marc Kassubeck, Bastian Wandt, Bodo Rosenhahn, Marcus Magnor:
Optical Flow-based 3D Human Motion Estimation from Monocular Video
in Proc. German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR), Springer, pp. 347-360, September 2017.

Martin Weier, Michael Stengel, Thorsten Roth, Piotr Didyk, Elmar Eisemann, Martin Eisemann, Steve Grogorick, André Hinkenjann, Ernst Kruijff, Marcus Magnor, Karol Myszkowski, Philipp Slusallek:
Perception-driven Accelerated Rendering
in Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of Eurographics EG), vol. 36, no. 2, The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., pp. 611-643, April 2017.

Thomas Löwe, Michael Stengel, Emmy-Charlotte Förster, Steve Grogorick, Marcus Magnor:
Gaze Visualization for Immersive Video
in Burch, Michael and Chuang, Lewis and Fisher, Brian and Schmidt, Albrecht and Weiskopf, Daniel (Eds.): Eye Tracking and Visualization, Springer, ISBN 978-3319470238, pp. 57-71, March 2017.


Michael Stengel, Marcus Magnor:
Gaze-contingent Computational Displays: Boosting perceptual fidelity
in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, vol. 33, no. 5, IEEE, pp. 139-148, September 2016.

Michael Stengel, Steve Grogorick, Martin Eisemann, Marcus Magnor:
Adaptive Image-Space Sampling for Gaze-Contingent Real-time Rendering
in Computer Graphics Forum (Proc. of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering EGSR), vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 129-139, July 2016.
EGSR'16 Best Paper Award

Related Projects

Comprehensive Human Performance Capture from Monocular Video Footage

Photo-realistic modeling and digital editing of image sequences with human actors are common tasks in the movies and games industry. The processes are however still laborious since tools only allow basic manipulations. In cooperation with the Institut für Informationsverarbeitung (TNT) of the University of Hannover (http://www.tnt.uni-hannover.de/), this project aims to solve this dilemma by providing algorithms and tools for automatic and semi-automatic digital editing of actors in monocular footage. To enable visual convincing renderings, a digital model of the human actor, detailed spatial scene information as well as scene illumination need to be reconstructed. Hereby plausible look and motion of the digital model are crucial.

This research project is partially funded by the German Science Foundation DFG.

Digital Representations of the Real World

The book presents the state-of-the-art of how to create photo-realistic digital models of the real world. It is the result of work by experts from around the world, offering a comprehensive overview of the entire pipeline from acquisition, data processing, and modelling to content editing, photo-realistic rendering, and user interaction.

Eye-tracking Head-mounted Display

Immersion is the ultimate goal of head-mounted displays (HMD) for Virtual Reality (VR) in order to produce a convincing user experience. Two important aspects in this context are motion sickness, often due to imprecise calibration, and the integration of a reliable eye tracking. We propose an affordable hard- and software solution for drift-free eye-tracking and user-friendly lens calibration within an HMD. The use of dichroic mirrors leads to a lean design that provides the full field-of-view (FOV) while using commodity cameras for eye tracking.

ICG Dome

Featuring more than 10 million pixels at 120 Hertz refresh rate, full-body motion capture, as well as real-time gaze tracking, our 5-meter ICG Dome enables us to research peripheral visual perception, to devise comprehensive foveal-peripheral rendering strategies, and to explore multi-user immersive visualization and interaction.

Perception of Video Manipulation

Recent advances in deep learning-based techniques enable highly realistic facial video manipulations. We investigate the response of human observers’ on these manipulated videos in order to assess the perceived realness of modified faces and their conveyed emotions.

Facial reenactment and face swapping offer great possibilities in creative fields like the post-processing of movie materials. However, they can also easily be abused to create defamatory video content in order to hurt the reputation of the target. As humans are highly specialized in processing and analyzing faces, we aim to investigate perception towards current facial manipulation techniques. Our insights can guide both the creation of virtual actors with a high perceived realness as well as the detection of manipulations based on explicit and implicit feedback of observers.

Preventing Motion Sickness in VR

Motion sickness, also referred as Simulator Sickness, Virtual sickness, or Cyber sickness, is a problem common to all types of visual simulators consisting of motion sickness-like symptoms that may be experienced while and after being exposed to a dynamic, immersive visualization. It leads to ethical concerns and impaired validity of simulator-based research. Due to the popularity of virtual reality devices, the number of people exposed to this problem is increasing and, therefore, it is crucial to not only find reliable predictors of this condition before any symptoms appear, but also find alternatives to fully prevent its occurrence while experiencing VR content.

Real-Action VR

Want to re-live your latest bungee jump? Share your incredible skateboard stunts with your friends in 360? Watch your last vacation adventures in full immersion and 3D? In this project we set out to pioneer the fully immersive experience of action camera recordings in VR headsets.

Reality CG

Scope of "Reality CG" is to pioneer a novel approach to modelling, editing and rendering in computer graphics. Instead of manually creating digital models of virtual worlds, Reality CG will explore new ways to achieve visual realism from the kind of approximate models that can be derived from conventional, real-world imagery as input.

Virtual Video Camera

The Virtual Video Camera research project is aimed to provide algorithms for rendering free-viewpoint video from asynchronous camcorder captures. We want to record our multi-video data without the need of specialized hardware or intrusive setup procedures (e.g., waving calibration patterns).