I’ll describe my work to develop new ways to record and render photorealistic actors and environments for movies, games, and virtual reality. Specifically, I’ll focus on what our Light Stage system can do. Light Stage systems scan live actors’ faces with geodesic spheres of inward-pointing LED lights to create digital actors’ faces that are more realistic and expressive. You might have seen Light Stage effects in Avatar, Benjamin Button, Furious 7, and Ready Player One. I’ll end by presenting Google VR's "Welcome to Light Fields," the first downloadable virtual-reality light-field experience that records and displays 360-degree photographic environments. This platform allows for a more immersive and interactive VR user-experience.

Bio: Paul Debevec is a Senior Scientist at Google VR and an adjunct research professor at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles. Paul a graduate of Urbana's University High School received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1996, where his thesis presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal architectural models from photographs. Using Façade he led the creation of virtual cinematography of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film The Campanile Movie whose techniques were used to create virtual backgrounds in The Matrix. Debevec pioneered high dynamic range image-based lighting techniques. At USC ICT, he continued the development of Light Stage devices for recording geometry and appearance and helped create new 3D Display devices for telepresence and teleconferencing. His work has received two Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievement, the SMPTE Progress Medal, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Significant New Researcher Award. http://www.debevec.org/