Local Expansion of Compressed Real Ray Data for Walking through the Photo-realistic Virtual World

How can we describe and transmit the whole visual data at a distant place? In order to answer such a question, the authors have proposed the concept of the “Space Coding” and examined a DCT-based method to compress real ray data. This paper discusses the application of this method to realize walking through the photo-realistic virtual world. Thanks to the random accessibility of the DCT-based method and the effective buffering presented in this paper, just the real ray data necessary for each viewpoint location can be efficiently extracted. Experimental results show the potential applicability of the proposed method to virtual reality and spatial communication system.