Deep Billboards towards Lossless Real2Sim in Virtual Reality

Understand

An aspirational goal for virtual reality (VR) is to bring in a rich diversity of real world objects losslessly.

• Existing VR applications often convert objects into explicit 3D models with meshes or point clouds, which allow fast interactive rendering but also severely limit its quality and the types of supported objects, fundamentally upper-bounding the "realism" of VR.
• Inspired by the classic "billboards" technique in gaming, we develop Deep Billboards that model 3D objects implicitly using neural networks, where only 2D image is rendered at a time based on the user's viewing direction.
• Our system, connecting a commercial VR headset with a server running neural rendering, allows real-time high-resolution simulation of detailed rigid objects, hairy objects, actuated dynamic objects and more in an interactive VR world, drastically narrowing the existing real-to-simulation (real2sim) gap.