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Creating a life-sized automultiscopic Morgan Spurlock for CNNs “Inside Man”
Andrew Jones∗
, Jonas Unger2, Koki Nagano, Jay Busch, Xueming Yu, Hsuan-Yueh Peng, Oleg Alexander, Paul Debevec
USC Institute for Creative Technologies 2Link¨
oping University
Figure 1: Three stereo photographs of Morgan Spurlock shown on the automultiscopic projector array. The display can be seen by multiple
viewers over a 135 ◦field of view without the need for special glasses. The images are left-right reversed for cross-fused stereo viewing.
We present a system for capturing and rendering life-size 3D hu-
man subjects on an automultiscopic display. Automultiscopic 3D
displays allow a large number of viewers to experience 3D content
simultaneously without the hassle of special glasses or head gear.
Such displays are ideal for human subjects as they allow for natural
personal interactions with 3D cues such as eye-gaze and complex
hand gestures. In this talk, we will focus on a case-study where
our system was used to digitize television host Morgan Spurlock
for his documentary show ”Inside Man” on CNN. Automultiscopic
displays work by generating many simultaneous views with high-
angular density over a wide-field of view. The angular spacing be-
tween between views must be small enough that each eye perceives
a distinct and different view. As the user moves around the dis-
play, the eye smoothly transitions from one view to the next. We
generate multiple views using a dense horizontal array of video
projectors. As video projectors continue to shrink in size, power
consumption, and cost, it is now possible to closely stack hundreds
of projectors so that their lenses are almost continuous. However
this display presents a new challenge for content acquisition. It
would require hundreds of cameras to directly measure every pro-
jector ray. We achieve similar quality with a new view interpolation
algorithm suitable for dense automultiscopic displays.
Our interpolation algorithm builds on Einarsson et al. [2006] who
used optical flow to resample a sparse light field. While Einarsson
et al. was limited to cyclical motions using a rotating turntable, we
use an array of 30 unsynchronized Panasonic X900MK 60p con-
sumer cameras spaced over 180 degrees to capture unconstrained
motion. We first synchronize our videos within 1/120 of a sec-
ond by aligning their corresponding sound waveforms. We com-
pute pair-wise spatial flow correspondences between cameras using
GPU optical flow. As each camera pair is processed independently,
the pipeline can be highly parallelized. As a result, we achieve
much shorter processing times than traditional multi-camera stereo
reconstructions. Our view interpolation algorithm maps images di-
rectly from the original video sequences to all the projectors in real-
time, and could easily scale to handle additional cameras or projec-
tors. For the ”Inside Man” documentary we recorded a 54 minute
interview with Morgan Spurlock, and processed 7 minutes of 3D
video for the final show.
Our projector array consists of 216 video projectors mounted in a
semi-circle with a 3.4m radius. We have a narrow 0.625 ◦spacing
between projectors which provides a large display depth of field
∗e-mail:jones@ict.usc.edu
Figure 2: (left)Seven of the cameras used to capture the perfor-
mance. (right) The array of 216 video projectors used to display
the subject.
with minimal aliasing. We use LED-powered Qumi v3 projectors
in a portrait orientation (Fig. 2). At this distance the projected
pixels fill a 2m tall anisotropic screen with a life-size human body
(Fig. 1). The screen material consists of a vertically-anisotropic
light shaping diffuser manufactured by Luiminit Co. The material
scatters light vertically (60 ◦) so that each pixel can be seen at mul-
tiple viewing heights and while maintaining a narrow horizontal
blur (1◦) to smoothly fill in the gaps between the projectors with
adjacent pixels. More details on the screen material can be found
in Jones et al. [2014]. We use six computers to render the projector
images. Each computer contains two ATI Eyefinity 7800 graphics
cards with 12 total video outputs. Each video signal is then divided
three ways using a Matrox TripleHead-to-Go video HDMI splitter.
In the future, we plan on capturing longer format interviews and
other dynamic performances. We are working to incorporate natu-
ral language processing to allow for true interactive conversations
with realistic 3D humans.
References
EINA RS SO N, P., CHAB ERT, C.-F., JO NE S, A ., MA, W.-C., LA-
MOND, B., HAWKI NS , T., BO LAS , M., SY LWAN, S., AND DE-
BE VE C, P. 2006. Relighting human locomotion with flowed
reflectance fields. In Rendering Techniques 2006: 17th Euro-
graphics Symposium on Rendering, 183–194.
JON ES , A., NAG AN O, K ., L IU, J., BUS CH , J., YU, X ., B OL AS,
M., AN D DEB EV EC , P. 2014. Interpolating vertical parallax for
an autostereoscopic 3d projector array.
