Mobile devices with passive depth sensing capabilities are ubiquitous, and recently active depth sensors have become available on some tablets and AR/VR devices. Although real-time depth data is accessible, its rich value to mainstream AR applications has been sorely under-explored. Adoption of depth-based UX has been impeded by the complexity of performing even simple operations with raw depth data, such as detecting intersections or constructing meshes. In this paper, we introduce DepthLab, a software library that encapsulates a variety of depth-based UI/UX paradigms, including geometry-aware rendering (occlusion, shadows), surface interaction behaviors (physics-based collisions, avatar path planning), and visual effects (relighting, 3D-anchored focus and aperture effects). We break down the usage of depth into localized depth, surface depth, and dense depth, and describe our real-time algorithms for interaction and rendering tasks. We present the design process, system, and components of DepthLab to streamline and centralize the development of interactive depth features. We have open-sourced our software at https://github.com/googlesamples/arcore-depth-lab to external developers, conducted performance evaluation, and discussed how DepthLab can accelerate the workflow of mobile AR designers and developers. With DepthLab we aim to help mobile developers to effortlessly integrate depth into their AR experiences and amplify the expression of their creative vision.

We present a system for capturing, reconstructing, compressing, and rendering high quality immersive light field video. We accomplish this by leveraging the recently introduced DeepView view interpolation algorithm, replacing its underlying multi-plane image (MPI) scene representation with a collection of spherical shells that are better suited for representing panoramic light field content. We further process this data to reduce the large number of shell layers to a small, fixed number of RGBA+depth layers without significant loss in visual quality. The resulting RGB, alpha, and depth channels in these layers are then compressed using conventional texture atlasing and video compression techniques. The final compressed representation is lightweight and can be rendered on mobile VR/AR platforms or in a web browser. We demonstrate light field video results using data from the 16-camera rig of [Pozo et al. 2019] as well as a new low-cost hemispherical array made from 46 synchronized action sports cameras. From this data we produce 6 degree of freedom volumetric videos with a wide 70 cm viewing baseline, 10 pixels per degree angular resolution, and a wide field of view, at 30 frames per second video frame rates. Advancing over previous work, we show that our system is able to reproduce challenging content such as view-dependent reflections, semi-transparent surfaces, and near-field objects as close as 34 cm to the surface of the camera rig.

We present "The Relightables", a volumetric capture system for photorealistic and high quality relightable full-body performance capture. While significant progress has been made on volumetric capture systems, focusing on 3D geometric reconstruction with high resolution textures, much less work has been done to recover photometric properties needed for relighting. Results from such systems lack high-frequency details and the subject's shading is prebaked into the texture. In contrast, a large body of work has addressed relightable acquisition for image-based approaches, which photograph the subject under a set of basis lighting conditions and recombine the images to show the subject as they would appear in a target lighting environment. However, to date, these approaches have not been adapted for use in the context of a high-resolution volumetric capture system. Our method combines this ability to realistically relight humans for arbitrary environments, with the benefits of free-viewpoint volumetric capture and new levels of geometric accuracy for dynamic performances. Our subjects are recorded inside a custom geodesic sphere outfitted with 331 custom color LED lights, an array of high-resolution cameras, and a set of custom high-resolution depth sensors. Our system innovates in multiple areas: First, we designed a novel active depth sensor to capture 12.4 MP depth maps, which we describe in detail. Second, we show how to design a hybrid geometric and machine learning reconstruction pipeline to process the high resolution input and output a volumetric video. Third, we generate temporally consistent reflectance maps for dynamic performers by leveraging the information contained in two alternating color gradient illumination images acquired at 60Hz. Multiple experiments, comparisons, and applications show that The Relightables significantly improves upon the level of realism in placing volumetrically captured human performances into arbitrary CG scenes.

We present a novel technique to relight images of human faces by learning a model of facial reflectance from a database of 4D reflectance field data of several subjects in a variety of expressions and viewpoints. Using our learned model, a face can be relit in arbitrary illumination environments using only two original images recorded under spherical color gradient illumination. The output of our deep network indicates that the color gradient images contain the information needed to estimate the full 4D reflectance field, including specular reflections and high frequency details. While capturing spherical color gradient illumination still requires a special lighting setup, reduction to just two illumination conditions allows the technique to be applied to dynamic facial performance capture. We show side-by-side comparisons which demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques in both realism and speed.