Abstract: The struggle to capture the lifelike appearance of the visual world has long preoccupied artist, photographers, cinematographers, and special effects supervisors. The advent of computers has made it possible to create interactive experiences that give an even greater sense of "being there" through the use of navigation, viewpoint control, and interaction with animated objects. Image-based modeling and rendering are now commonly used tools to facilitate the creation and display of photorealistic models, but are commonly limited to static scenes. The ability to process video to create dynamic visual experiences, i.e., video-based rendering is the next frontier.

In this talk, I review a number of image-based modeling and rendering systems and discuss some of the representations and estimation algorithms that they use. I also present our work in video-based rendering, in which we synthesize novel video from short sample clips by discovering the hidden (quasi-repetive) temporal structure. Image-based and video-based rendering can be combined to create compelling interactive photorealistic experiences. I demonstrate some of these experiences with a particular focus on visiting remote sites of interest, i.e., Virtual Tourism.