The history of landscape painting and photography is characterized by a desire to convey a vivid sense of presence (and beauty) to the viewer. The advent of digital and interactive photography such as panoramic "VR" experiences has heightened the sense of immersion and realism that is attainable, but is there more? In this talk, I discuss additional dimensions available in such immersive experiences, including movement, sound, higher dynamic range, and 3D exploration and viewpoint control. In the process, I point out the increasing permeable barriers between the traditionally distinct disciplines of photography, video, and 3D graphics.
Richard Szeliski leads the Interactive Visual Media Group at Microsoft Research, which does research in digital and computational photography, video scene analysis, 3-D computer vision, and image-based rendering. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, in 1988. He joined Microsoft Research in 1995. Prior to Microsoft, he worked at Bell-Northern Research, Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, and the Cambridge Research Lab of Digital Equipment Corporation.
Dr. Szeliski has published over 100 research papers in computer vision, computer graphics, medical imaging, and neural nets, as well as the book Bayesian Modeling of Uncertainty in Low-Level Vision. He was a Program Committee Chair for ICCV'2001 and the 1999 Vision Algorithms Workshop, and served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision.