OmniPhotos: Casual 360° VR Photography with Motion Parallax

Abstract

Until now, immersive 360° VR panoramas could not be captured casually and reliably at the same time as state-of-the-art approaches involve time-consuming or expensive capture processes that prevent the casual capture of real-world VR environments. Existing approaches are also often limited in their supported range of head motion. We introduce OmniPhotos, a novel approach for casually and reliably capturing high-quality 360° VR panoramas. Our approach only requires a single sweep of a consumer 360° video camera as input, which takes less than 3 seconds with a rotating selfie stick. The captured video is transformed into a hybrid scene representation consisting of a coarse scene-specific proxy geometry and optical flow between consecutive video frames, enabling 5-DoF real-world VR experiences. The large capture radius and 360° field of view significantly expand the range of head motion compared to previous approaches. Among all competing methods, ours is the simplest, and fastest by an order of magnitude. We have captured more than 50 OmniPhotos and show video results for a large variety of scenes. We will make our code and datasets publicly available.