US 2019/0378331 A1 · VIRTUAL WORLD GENERATION ENGINE

Abstract

A virtual world generation engine and methods for generating virtual worlds from images collected from various sources, including crowdsourced images. A virtual world generation engine may obtain images (e.g., digital photographs, digital video frames, etc.) related to a particular real-world scene, combine the images using image processing techniques such as image stitching techniques to generate composite images representing a view of the scene, and generate models from the composite images. The models may be used in rendering video content representing virtual worlds generated from the collected images of real-world scenes; the video content may be streamed to client device(s). Obtaining the images, generating models, rendering video content from the models, and streaming the video content may be performed in response to user interactions with video content on the client device(s) to allow interactive exploration of the virtual worlds in real-time or near-real time.

Claims21

Dependent claims

A system, comprising:

one or more computing devices configured to implement a video system comprising:
an image collection module configured to obtain digital images from one or more sources, each image capturing a portion of a real-world scene;
a virtual world generation engine configured to:
identify two or more of the images that include overlapping portions of the scene;
combine the identified images according to one or more digital image processing techniques to generate a composite image representing a view of the scene;
and
generate a model of the scene according to the composite image;
one or more video processing modules configured to:
render video of the scene from the model of the scene;
and
stream the video of the scene to a client device.

8 more elements

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing program instructions that when executed on one or more computers cause the one or more computers to implement a real-time video exploration (RVE) system configured to:

receive input from a client device indicating user interactions with video content on the client device;
in response to the user interactions:
obtain a plurality of images that include content related to a real-world scene indicated by the user interactions with the video content;
select at least two of the obtained images according to the user interactions with the video content;
and
send the selected images to the client device for display to the user.

3 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Virtual world generation engine

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Virtual world generation engine

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Abstract

Claims21