A Method of Recording Navigable Movies in 3D Virtual Worlds

This paper proposes a method for recording navigable movies, with which one can navigate within a movie, in a 3D virtual world like Second Life.
Existing technologies for navigable movies like iCinema’s products can be regarded as an extension to Apple’s QuickTime VR and require for a navigable movie to record in a 2D movie format like MPEG2 where the cylindrical or spherical panorama view of the recorded target at a moment are captured in each frame of the 2D movie. A movie player allows a human movie viewer to change the direction of camera to watch different angles in the panoramic movie. With a QuickTime VR approach, navigable positions of a camera are fixed or very limited as it requires different set of a move for each position of the camera.
Another naïve approach to record a navigable movie in a 3D virtual world is to record all the 3D models and moves available in the virtual world of the recording target for the recorded duration. It requires a large amount of memory space and computation cost for copying and storing all the 3D models especially when there are lots of complex 3D models.
Contorary to those previous methods, in our approach, we efficiently record a movie with the following steps.
1 In a recording step, a recorder system roughly and conservatively determines the 3D objects needed to record according to a given navigable range. For the quick perpetuation of the objects, it marks objects in the virtual world instead of storing the copies of them while actually recording any movement of the objects.
2 In a record keeping and trimming step, a perpetuator system interrupts any modification action on marked objects. A trimmer system periodically disposes unneeded marks or redundantly saved objects.
By using these steps, this approach enables reducing memory space for recording the shape data of a number of 3D objects.

By: Tatsubori Michiaki, Akira Koseki

Published in: RT0860 in 2009

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