The first Saturday Physics lecture this season will take place on Saturday, September 14, 2019. Paul Debevec, Senior Scientist at Google VR and adjunct research professor at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles will present his talk: "Creating Photoreal Digital Human Characters for Movies, Games, and Virtual Reality”. 

Speaker: Paul Debevec, Senior Scientist at Google VR and an Adj. Research Prof. at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies

Title:       "Creating Photoreal Digital Human Characters for Movies, Games, and Virtual Reality”
Day:         Saturday, September 14, 2019
Time:       10:15 AM (Refreshments served at 10 AM)
Place:      141 Loomis, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, IL  61801

Abstract: I’ll be talking about the work I’ve done at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Google VR to develop new ways to record and render photorealistic actors and environments for movies, games, and virtual reality. Specifically, I’ll focus on what our Light Stage system can do. We’ve used Light Stage to scan live actors’ faces to create digital actors’ faces that are more realistic and expressive; the scanning is done with geodesic spheres of inward-pointing LED lights. You might have seen Light Stage effects in  Avatar, Benjamin Button, Maleficent, Furious 7,Blade Runner: 2049, and Ready Player One. Light Stage can also reproduce the kind of omnidirectional lighting environments we have in the real world, to make cinematic and virtual worlds come to life. Our system has recently been outfitted with multispectral LED lights that better mimic the colors of daylight, incandescent, and mixed lighting environments. Our full-body Light Stage 6 system has also been used to record and project interactive, hologram-like conversations with survivors of the Holocaust through natural language processing and an automultiscopic projector array. I’ll end the talk by presenting Google VR's "Welcome to Light Fields," the first downloadable virtual-reality light-field experience that records and displays 360-degree photographic environments. This VR system allows users to move inside virtual environments with six degrees of freedom, resulting in a far more comfortable and immersive VR experience.

Bio: Paul Debevec is a Senior Scientist at Google VR and an adjunct research professor at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles. Paul graduated from Urbana's University High School and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC-Berkeley in 1996, where his thesis presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal architectural models from photographs. Using Façade he led the creation of virtual cinematography of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film The Campanile Movie. The techniques he developed were used to create virtual backgrounds in The Matrix. Debevec pioneered high dynamic-range, image-based lighting techniques. At USC ICT, he continued the development of Light Stage devices for recording geometry and appearance and helped create new 3D Display devices for telepresence and teleconferencing.  His work has received two Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievement, the SMPTE Progress Medal, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award.  http://www.debevec.org/

Lectures followed by Q&A last approximately 60 minutes. They are open to the general public and are free of charge.  We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Questions?  
Email sat_physics@physics.illinois.edu