NeRFPlayer: A Streamable Dynamic Scene Representation with Decomposed Neural Radiance Fields.

Visually exploring in a real-world 4D spatiotemporal space freely in VR has been a long-term quest. The task is especially appealing when only a few or even single RGB cameras are used for capturing the dynamic scene. To this end, we present an efficient framework capable of fast reconstruction, compact modeling, and streamable rendering. First, we propose to decompose the 4D spatiotemporal space according to temporal characteristics. Points in the 4D space are associated with probabilities of belonging to three categories: static, deforming, and new areas. Each area is represented and regularized by a separate neural field. Second, we propose a hybrid representations based feature streaming scheme for efficiently modeling the neural fields. Our approach, coined NeRFPlayer, is evaluated on dynamic scenes captured by single hand-held cameras and multi-camera arrays, achieving comparable or superior rendering performance in terms of quality and speed comparable to recent state-of-the-art methods, achieving reconstruction in 10 seconds per frame and interactive rendering. Project website: https://bit.ly/nerfplayer.

Refocusable Gigapixel Panoramas for Immersive VR Experiences.

There have been significant advances in capturing gigapixel panoramas (GPP). However, solutions for viewing GPPs on head-mounted displays (HMDs) are lagging: an immersive experience requires ultra-fast rendering while directly loading a GPP onto the GPU is infeasible due to limited texture memory capacity. In this paper, we present a novel out-of-core rendering technique that supports not only classic panning, tilting, and zooming but also dynamic refocusing for viewing a GPP on HMD. Inspired by the network package transmission mechanisms in distributed visualization, our approach employs hierarchical image tiling and on-demand data updates across the main and the GPU memory. We further present a multi-resolution rendering scheme and a refocused light field rendering technique based on RGBD GPPs with minimal memory overhead. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our technique is highly efficient and reliable, able to achieve ultra-high frame rates ( fps) even on low-end GPUs. With an embedded gaze tracker, our technique enables immersive panorama viewing experiences with unprecedented resolutions, field-of-view, and focus variations while maintaining smooth spatial, angular, and focal transitions.