The Stanford Light Field Project is investigating techniques for representing environments and objects as a "light field" -- i.e. the flow of light through space. In the absence of occluders, we can represent this light field as a 4D function of position and direction. This leads to an efficient algorithm for image-based rendering.
For an introduction to light fields, see Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan, Light Field Rendering, Proc. SIGGRAPH '96. The slides from the SIGGRAPH '96 talk are now online, too.
The available software consists of a real-time viewer for light fields (click on lifview below) and an authoring kit for making your own light fields from arrays of images (click on lifauth). These are available in binary form (so far only for SGIs and PCs) and as source code (click on lifsource). We also have an archive of pre-computed light fields (click on lifs). Finally, if you don't want to download our viewer, we have some MPEGs demonstrating an interactive session with our viewer (click on mpegs).
Except for commercial resale, lease, license or other commercial transactions, permission is hereby given to use, copy, and/or modify this software, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies of this software. No part of this software or any derivatives thereof may be used in the production of light fields for resale or for use in a commercial product.
This software is provided "as is" and without warranty of any kind, express, implied or otherwise, including without limitation, any warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory