Simulated Window Visual Interface

• Junling Du
• Rui Li
• Wenjing Li
• Chuanyuan Zhang

Advisor: Vladimir Goncharoff, PhD

Our project is to simulate the view through a window between two rooms, even though the two rooms may be across the world from one another. A fish-eye lens detects a 180-degree view in the first room, the video is sent to a second room at a different location where the signal is processed and displayed. The processing is in response to the viewer’s head position in the second room as it shifts position to “look through the window” of the display monitor. The final effect is that an illusion is created to the viewer: as the viewer’s head changes position relative to the display monitor (as detected by another camera), the displayed image changes accordingly to produce a realistic effect. The feature of our system is that users can switch the perspective of observation by simply moving their heads, as if they were looking through a window. Technical challenges to be solved included video transmission between the two environments and real-time image processing to render a specific perspective view in the second room. Applications of our system include single-camera security monitoring, safety monitoring of elderly relatives who live apart from the family, two-way video conferencing, and interesting art displays of views from famous world landmarks.

See supporting documentation in the team’s Box drive.