Master Thesis | Maximilian Oliver Rubin
Point Clouds; Design+Multimedia
Research Paper
Thesis
Capturing environments and moments in time has always been something humans have been fascinated by – from paintings to analogue photography, to digital cameras. With the recent developments to AR and VR technologies, direct volumetric capture of reality has been gaining traction, with the potential of creating immersive, state-of-the-art visuals, blurring the lines between the real and virtual worlds.
Capturing and transmitting space itself is one of the leading challenges in the field of immersive media. Capturing areas such as sites of cultural heritage is part of this equation and has generally been achieved either by 360-degree video or photography. However, these methods limit the user’s full sense of depth of the image.
A solution to overcome this limitation consists of capturing real-world data through reality capture methods, resulting in a set of data points in space called a point cloud. This point cloud then passes through a reconstruction process, transforming it into a 3D polygonal mesh. However, this process limits its ability to provide a deeper sense of immersion and can introduce undesirable interpolations of reality. Nonetheless, by using point clouds as the basis of an immersive environment, we can explore new visual languages and alternate modes of perception.
The objective of this thesis is the creation of a point cloudbased digital timestamp of the Botanical Garden of the University of Coimbra, by capturing reality and thus a moment in time that can be run and visualised in 3D space (through Virtual Reality), in real-time. This digital timestamp consists of three distinct locations within the Garden, containing century-old tree specimens. These areas were digitised through photogrammetry to create point clouds, which were then used as the basis of an immersive audio-visual experience whose main goal was to convey the ambiance of the Garden, along with showing people its natural processes usually hidden to the naked eye with the aim to rekindle our relationship with nature.
This thesis resulted in multimedia content consisting of PC and VR based experiences, and 360 degree videos. Both PC and VR variants were evaluated by 22 volunteers, resulting in a positive response distribution for the user’s experience in relation to their relationship with the natural world.