Surreal Vision Joins Oculus
We’re thrilled to announce that the Surreal Vision team has
joined Oculus Research!
Surreal Vision is one of
the top computer vision teams in the world focused on real-time 3D
scene reconstruction – generating an accurate representation of the
real world in the virtual world. Great scene reconstruction will
enable a new level of presence and telepresence, allowing you to
move around the real world and interact with real-world objects
from within VR.
Richard Newcombe, Renato Salas-Moreno, and Steven
Lovegrove of Surreal Vision
The three founders, all PhDs from Andrew Davison’s pioneering
lab at Imperial College London, are Richard
Newcombe, the inventor of KinectFusion,
DynamicFusion and
DTAM
(Dense Tracking and Mapping) and co-inventor of SLAM++;
Renato Salas-Moreno, the inventor of SLAM++ (SLAM at
the level of objects), and Dense Planar
SLAM; and Steven Lovegrove, the co-inventor of
DTAM and author of SplineFusion.
The team wanted to share a few words on their vision for Surreal
at Oculus:
“From the human point of view, the world is constantly in
motion. As we move around, our eyes dart about the scene and the
rich dynamical nature of the scene’s contents come flooding in.
We’re able to make sense of those changing signals to produce a
coherent understanding of the world we live in, which we
effortlessly navigate and interact with. Over the past three
decades, a great deal of work in computer vision has attempted to
mimic human-class perceptual capabilities using color and depth
cameras.
At Surreal Vision, we are overhauling state-of-the-art 3D
scene reconstruction algorithms to provide a rich, up-to-date model
of everything in the environment including people and their
interactions with each other. We’re developing breakthrough
techniques to capture, interpret, manage, analyse, and finally
reproject in real-time a model of reality back to the user in a way
that feels real, creating a new, mixed reality that brings together
the virtual and real worlds.
Ultimately, these technologies will lead to VR and AR
systems that can be used in any condition, day or night, indoors or
outdoors. They will open the door to true telepresence, where
people can visit anyone, anywhere.
Much progress has been made toward this future, but
significant challenges remain. For virtual reality, the accuracy
and quality of the continuously updating 3D reconstruction must be
near flawless, which is a requirement almost no other modern
computer vision problem faces. When we cross these seminal
thresholds, users will perceive the virtual world as truly real –
and that is the experience we’re driving toward.
By achieving the ability to continuously reconstruct and
track the world around us, we’ll be able to build an understanding
of the world at a semantic level. This will bring the power of the
digital world to the myriad of interactions we as humans perform
everyday, leading toward a breakthrough in human-computer
interaction and a computing platform that has true spatial
awareness.
Given the team, the resources, and this shared vision,
there’s no better place for us to help bring about these
breakthroughs than Oculus. We’re incredibly excited for the
future.” — Richard and the Surreal Vision
team
Richard, Renato, and Steven will continue their work pushing the
boundaries of computer vision and scene reconstruction as part of
Oculus Research in Redmond, Washington. Please join us in welcoming
them to the team!
— The Oculus team