未踏IT人材発掘・育成事業（本体）：2008年度下期採択プロジェクト概要（山崎PJ）

1．担当プロジェクトマネージャー

David J. Farber（Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy Carnegie Mellon University）

2．採択者氏名

チーフクリエータ：山崎　俊太郎（産業技術総合研究所　デジタルヒューマン研究センター・研究員）
コクリエータ：なし

3．未踏ユースプロジェクト管理組織

学校法人国際大学（グローバル・コミュニケーション・センター）

4．採択金額

4,800,000円

5．テーマ名

AJAX Platform for Image Based Rendering in Cloud Computing

6．関連Webサイト

http://www.dh.aist.go.jp/~shun/research/ajax/

7．申請テーマ概要

With the recent ubiquity of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technologies, web applications can provide the user experience end-users have demanded for a long time. Rich client and web applications are converging with regard to functionality and usability - web applications are becoming "Rich" with respect to UI capabilities, rich client applications are offering better deployment and management functionality.

We develop a software platform that enables users to view real-world objects interactively by changing viewpoints using AJAX technology. Our rendering technique is image-based --- the virtual views of an object are synthesized by interpolating 2D images, leveraging the high-quality of recent digital photographs. This approach alleviates the difficulty of modeling 3D geometry in existing approaches to 3D computer graphics. The software can run on various kinds of devices using web browser without additional software installation, which makes it possible for users to experience photo-realistic 3D computer graphics in cloud computing environment.

Our software platform consists of two components:

(1) Content creation software: Our server software reconstructs a light field (a set of light rays in 3D space) from uncalibrated camera images. Given the images of an object acquired by a user, the system automatically estimates 3D structure of the scene from the camera motion and reconstructs the light field.

(2) Content rendering software: Our client software synthesizes the 3D virtual views of the object using light field rendering technique. We use AJAX technology, which allows users to see the object interactively from preferred view-points using standard web-browsers on a variety of hardware platforms.

The goal of this project is to make it easy for non-researchers to use the state-of-the-art techniques developed in computer vision and graphics communities. We provide the application programming interface (API) to the developed software so that other web-application developers can plug the software easily into their own services. We believe this is the first step to developing the practical application of 3D computer graphics in web-based computing environment.

8．採択理由

This project is complementary to several others I have managed or prose to manage. The notion of the mobile phone as a part of a distributed computing environment - a cloud - offers the opportunity to provide significant computing power to the limited mobile environment. In particular a two way path between the phone and the rest of the cloud offers an interesting set of possibilities . The research appears to be experienced and competent and thus should achieve the goals.