Road to the Holodeck: Lightfields and Volumetric VR

by The VR/AR Association

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Date and Time

Wed, June 14, 2017

6:00 PM – 10:00 PM PDT

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Location

The Flight Deck

1540 Broadway

Oakland, CA 94612

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Event description

Description

ALERT 6/14: Due to the logistics and road barricades for the 6/15 Warriors Victory Parade (closures start at 6pm tonight) we are forced to postpone this event. After long discussions with the venue and Oakland PD, we regretfully arrived on this conclusion.

We will devise the postponement date ASAP. Registered attendees will receive an email alert, automatic admission to the new date, and a little something extra. We will issue full refunds to anyone who can not attend on the new date.

More to come soon.

**For the VR/AR Association's next SF Chapter event, we'll dive into lightfields.**

We'll examine the future outlook, as well as work being done today for volumetric photo capture in interior spaces like real estate.

Join us for an evening of networking, demos, food and illuminating discussion. Special Guests: Exit Reality, Kunze Productions, Fifer Garbesi, Linda Jacobson, and Siciliana Trevino.

Speakers

Alex Song, Director of Engineering, VR, Lytro

Colvin Pitts, Senior Architect, Lytro

Ryan Damm 200px

Ryan Damm, Lightfield Thought Leader, Co-Founder, Visby

Emily Olman Headshot

Emily Olman, SF Chapter Co-President, VRARA; Founder, Hopscotch Interactive

Mike Boland, SF Chapter Co-President, VRARA; Chief Analyst, ARtillry

What's a lightfield, you ask?

Several technologies are required for VR's holy grail: the fabled holodeck. We already have graphical VR experiences that let us move throughout volumentric spaces, such as video games. And we have photorealistic media that lets us look around a 360 plane from a fixed position (a.k.a. head tracking).

But what about the best of both worlds?

We're talking volumetric spaces in which you can move around, but are also photorealistic. In addition to things like positional tracking and lots of processing horsepower, the heart of this vision is lightfields. They define how photons hit our eyes and render what we see.

Because it's a challenge to capture photorealistic imagery from every possible angle in a given space -- as our eyes do in real reality -- the art of lightfields in VR involves extrapolating many vantage points, once a fixed point is captured. And that requires clever algorithms, processing, and whole lot of data.

Join us on June 14th to dive deeper, and read more about our events and past coverage here.