Ray-based creation of photo-realistic virtual world

Introduces the concept of ray-based representation of spatial data and proposes a new method for creating a photo-realistic virtual world. In this method, the complete set of ray data of the world is treated as a set of orthogonal views of scene objects. The advantage of this approach is to allow the synthesis of any perspective view by gathering appropriate ray data from the set of orthogonal views, independent of any geometric representation. First, several perspective views of the real world are taken as a set of real ray data, and orthogonal views of the world are synthesized from the captured real ray data. Then, structural models corresponding to each perspective view are estimated locally and are adaptively joined to each other in order to interpolate the “cracks” in the orthogonal views. This approach can avoid the difficulties of estimating a unique structural model of the world