Immersive Trip Reports

Photography presentation, hike, image geo-localization, terrain model, immersive visualization

Since the advent of consumer photography, tourists and hikers have made photo records of their trips to share later. Aside from being kept as memories, photo presentations such as slideshows are also shown to others who have not visited the location to try to convey the experience. However, a slideshow alone is limited in conveying the broader spatial context, and thus the feeling of presence in beautiful natural scenery is lost. We address this by presenting the photographs as part of an immersive experience. We introduce an automated pipeline for aligning photographs with a digital terrain model. From this geographic registration, we produce immersive presentations which are viewed either passively as a video, or interactively in virtual reality. Our experimental evaluation verifies that this new mode of presentation successfully conveys the spatial context of the scene and is enjoyable to users.

We propose a novel method for automatic creation of virtual photo presentations from hikes. The goal is to create a presentation of photographs aligned with the virtual terrain in a form of an interactive "fly-through", where the user follows the reconstructed path along the hike and visits the photographs taken during the hike. We propose two modes of presentation: (I) passive mode, where the user enjoys the presentation rendered into a video; (II) interactive mode, where the user enjoys immersive fly-through in virtual reality. 

Our method can be used instead of a plain slideshow of photographs to add spatial context to the presentation. According to our experiments, this new form of presentation is more enjoyable than traditional slideshow presentations and helps the user to better understand the area where the photographs were taken. 

This research has been conducted in cooperation with Adobe Research. Furthermore, Adobe and Brno University of Technology, FIT filed the US patent application, which is now pending. This publication has been presented on the 31stACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2018) in Berlin, Germany. The official paper is publicly available through the ACM Digital Library: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3242653. More information as well as the video summarizing our paper and demo is available on the project webpage: http://cphoto.fit.vutbr.cz/immersive-trip-reports/.