A Light Field Journey To Virtual Reality

Professor Jingyi Yu was invited to give a keynote speech” A Light Field Journey to Virtual Reality” at the first Global Virtual Reality Conference (GVRC) held on June 8th , 2016 in Jinqiao, Shanghai.

Professor Yu, a full professor at ShanghaiTech University, is currently the director of the Visual Computing Laboratory in the School of Information Science and Technology. He has been working on computer graphics, computer vision,computational photography, video surveillance, and non-conventional optics and camera designs since a long time. He has been granted 10 US patents on computational imaging and he is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the AFOSR YIP Award, and the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award at the University of Delaware in 2008 and 2009.

The global virtual reality conference (GVRC) was held at China Europe International Business School, Jinqiao, Shanghai. The theme of the conference was “Innovation Creates New World”. It attracted the most influential scientists, corporate executives, innovators and industrial leaders in the area of virtual reality (VR). 

Professor Yu summarized his exciting research on light fields from the past 10 years. He first introduced a brief history of VR/AR and his personal experience on the evolution of their core technologies: acquisition, processing, and display, then discussed the limitation of classical approaches and showed why light fields provide a viable path. Prof. Yu showed how light field head-mounted displays (LF-HMD) could provide unprecedented refocusing capability analogous to human eyes to significantly enhance visual realism.

Professor Yuemphasized that in conventional VR stereoscopy, two images from differentperspectives are overlapped in order to create illusions for humans, whichresults easily in eyestrain, fatigue, and visual discomfort. His developmentsin VR based on light fields are though to overcome these issues by combiningideas from graphics and vision.

The light fieldtechnique reproduces depth information embedded in the scene for humans.Therefore, even with only one eye, people can still feel like immersed in areal world.

Professor Yu’s talk has attracted a heated responsefrom the audience. After the talk, lots of attendees approached him for furtherquestions and discussions.