Attending a live event, be it a musical concert, a theatrical performance, or a
football match is undeniably one of the most exciting way to appreciate any entertainment. In order to bring the powerful experience of `being there´ also to those viewers who are not able to participate, immersive media must be able to reproduce the psychological and physical cues that an observer is using to feel `present´ in the real world. Such cues include, amoung others, high-quality, high-resolution imagery, a wide field-of-view (FOV), multi-channel surround sound, etc.
In this work, we developed an approach for creating high-resolution video paronamas of large-scale sport events. In the following, we describe the workflow on the basis of an exemplaryfootball scenario:
For acquisition, we relied on two ARRIFLEX D-20 `film-style´digital cameras, which were used to capture the complete playing field as well as large parts of the tribunes. The cameras were setup such that each of them covered one side of the field (see Fig. 1) with the focal points being as close together as possible. By using 20 mm Ultra Prime lenses with an opening angle of 62.8° we were able to capture a viewing area of about 119° in total. An overlap of about 10° is required for the later registration of the left and right views into a joint panoramic video.
Fig. 1: The left and right view images
with a spatial resolution of 2880x2160 pel.
From the captured left and right view video sequences, we created a 5016x1400 pel (5k) panorama of the football match using sophisticated image processing algorithms. To do so, two different types of adjustments were required:
- The geometric adjustments transformed the input imagery into a joint panoramic view and it also corrected for parallax errors that resulted from the chosen dual-camera setup.
- The photometric adjustments corrected for any mismatches in colors between the left and right images in order to generate smooth transitions between the two views.
The result is a 5k football panorama with a perspective that is comparable to what a viewer would see from the `perfect´ seat at the height of the midline (see Fig. 2). In contrast to a regular football broadcat he can always see the complete playing field as well as the tribunes on three sides of the field. This enornmous viewing angle, combined with the possibility to see and feel the other spectators as well as to hear the original stadium sound contribute to the immersive feeling of actually watching the game from a good seat on the stands.
Fig. 2: The final football
panorama with a resolution of 5016x1400 pel.
For the presentation of the immersive football panoramas we used five Christie DLP projectors with a resolution of 1400x1050 pel in a special multi-projection setup developed at our lab. The heart of the system is the so-called CineCard, a PCI plug-in card that contains dedicated hardware (e.g., for alpha blending, black level adjustment, and colormetric corrections) for providing seamless transitions between the individual sub-images.
In order to show the potential of this promissing technology for the immersive presentation of sports events in a cinema, the multi-projection system was presented to a selected group of journalists, cinematographers and industry
professionals during the FIFA World Cup 2006 in a 600 seat CinemaxX movie theater in Berlin (see Fig. 3). The overall size of the panoramic 5k renditions was 20 m x 5.6 m, the total light intensity was equal to 42.000 ANSI Lumens (8.500 ANSI Lumens
per individual projector).
Fig. 3: The final presentation during the FIFA World Cup 2006 in Berlin. |
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