Talk Abstract:  Current endeavors towards immersive visual entertainment are still almost entirely based on 3D graphics content, limiting application scenarios to digital, synthetic worlds only. The reason is that in order to provide for stereo vision and ego-motion parallax, two essential ingredients for visual immersion perception, the scene must be rendered in real-time from varying vantage points. While this can be easily accomplished in 3D graphics via GPU rendering, it is not at all straight-forward to do the same from conventional video footage acquired of real-world events. In my talk I will outline different ideas and approaches of how to utilize graphics hardware in conjunction with video in order to import the real world into 3D graphics and HMDs.

Biography: Marcus Magnor heads the Computer Graphics Lab of the Computer Science Department at Technische Universität Braunschweig (TU Braunschweig). He received his BA (1995) and MS (1997) in physics from Würzburg University and the University of New Mexico, respectively, and his PhD (2000) in electrical engineering from Erlangen University. For his post-graduate studies, he joined the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University. In 2002, he established the Independent Research Group Graphics-Optics-Vision at the Max-Planck-Institut Informatik in Saarbrücken. He completed his habilitation in 2005 and received the venia legendi for computer science from Saarland University. In addition to his full professorship at TU Braunschweig, he holds an appointment as adjunct professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of New Mexico, USA. He is alumnus of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a former Fulbright scholar, elected member of the Braunschweigische Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft,  and laureate of the Wissenschaftspreis Niedersachsen. His research interests concern visual computing, i.e. visual information processing from image formation, acquisition, and analysis to image synthesis, display, perception, and cognition. Areas of research include, but are not limited to, computer graphics, vision, visual perception, image processing, computational photography, astrophysics, imaging, optics, visual analytics, and visualization (research).