Road to the Holodeck: Lightfields and Volumetric VR

It's come and gone, but it looked to be very interesting.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/road-to-the-holodeck-lightfields-and-volumetric-vr-tickets-34087827610#

What's a lightfield, you ask?

Several technologies are required for VR's holy grail: the fabled holodeck. We already have graphical VR experiences that let us move throughout volumentric spaces, such as video games. And we have photorealistic media that lets us look around a 360 plane from a fixed position (a.k.a. head tracking).

But what about the best of both worlds?

We're talking volumetric spaces in which you can move around, but are also photorealistic. In addition to things like positional tracking and lots of processing horsepower, the heart of this vision is lightfields. They define how photons hit our eyes and render what we see.

Because it's a challenge to capture photorealistic imagery from every possible angle in a given space -- as our eyes do in real reality -- the art of lightfields in VR involves extrapolating many vantage points, once a fixed point is captured. And that requires clever algorithms, processing, and whole lot of data.