Extending 6-DoF VR Experience Via Multi-Sphere Images Interpolation

Three-degrees-of-freedom (3-DoF) omnidirectional imaging has been widely used in various applications ranging from street maps to 3-DoF VR live broadcasting. Although allowing for navigating viewpoints rotationally inside a virtual world, it does not provide motion parallax key for human 3D perception. Recent research mitigates this problem by introducing 3 transitional degrees of freedom (6-DoF) using multi-sphere images (MSI) which is beginning to show promises in handling occlusions and reflective objects. However, the design of MSI naturally limits the range of authentic 6-DoF experiences, as existing mechanisms for MSI rendering cannot fully utilize multi-layer information when synthesizing novel views between multiple MSIs. To tackle this problem and extend the 6-DoF range, we propose an MSI interpolation pipeline that utilizes adjacent MSIs' 3D information embedded inside their layers. In this work, we describe an MSI projection scheme along with an MSI interpolation network to predict intermediate MSIs in order to facilitate the need for extended range. We demonstrate that our system significantly improves the range of 6-DoF experience compared with other MSI-based methods. With extensive experiments, we show our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively in synthesizing novel view panoramas.