COOL ALUMNI
by David Pescovitz
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Photographs were "projected" onto the computer model resulting in a highly-realistic animation. (courtesy the researchers)
Watch The Campanile Movie in all its virtual glory. (Quicktime movie)
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In 1997, special effects wizards Paul Debevec (Ph.D.'96 CS), George Borshukov (M.S.'97 EE), Camillo Taylor, and Yizhou Yu (Ph.D. 2000 CS) develop a "virtual cinematography" technology that brought a new sense of realism to digital animation. The technology later appeared in The Matrix, Mission: Impossible 2, and Deep Blue Sea and, in 2000, earned Borshukov an Academy Award.
A crowd of graduate students wait anxiously as the video begins to play. On the screen, computer science Ph.D. candidate Paul Debevec places down a small architect's model of Berkeley's Sather Tower, known as the Campanile, in the center of the campus. The camera zooms in on the model, sweeps around it at breakneck speed, and pulls back out again, revealing the entire Berkeley campus below the tower.
At the end of the film, professor Jitendra Malik pays his students the ultimate compliment. "Which parts are real and which are synthetic?" he asks.
The film demonstrated a massive breakthrough in computer graphics. The researchers had created an incredibly photorealistic three-dimensional animation of the campus using a technique known as image-based rendering.
Computer-generated model of the Campanile. (courtesy the researchers)
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"In so many of the architectural graphics, the geometry was rough, the lighting was strange, and the buildings looked like shoe boxes with photos glued on," says Debevec, now a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. "We wanted to do something that would have people fooled for a moment."
The project began with 16 photographs of the campus snapped by Debevec. The researchers then used their own software, called Facade, to model the scene by matching the edges of basic geometric blocks, such as boxes, to outlined segments in the photographs. The software -- developed with postdoc Camillo Taylor, now at the University of Pennsylvania -- determined the vantage point from which each photo was taken. Another program, written by Ph.D. student Yizhou Yu -- currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- calculated which parts of the buildings were hidden at any moment. Masters student George Borshukov implemented algorithms that enabled the textures from the original photographic images to be added in real time. Once the virtual campus model was complete, the researchers generated their fly-through movie.
The Campanile Movie premiered with a massive buzz at SIGGRAPH 1997, the key conference for computer graphics professionals. That's where John Gaeta, the visual effects supervisor for the film The Matrix , caught a screening. Blown away by what he saw, Gaeta hired Borshukov to bring the Berkeley technology to The Matrix project. The technique was the basis for the film's famed "bullet time" sequence, in which Keanu Reeves dodges bullets in slow motion. The techniques were crucial for The Matrix winning the Oscar for Best Visual Effects in 1999.
In 2000, Borshukov was awarded an Academy Scientific and Technical Achievement Award "for the development of a system for image-based rendering allowing choreographed camera movements through computer graphic reconstructed sets." Debevec also continues to be involved with Hollywood, most recently helping bring to life several all-digital scenes of actors Alfred Molina and Tobey MacGuire in Spiderman 2. As executive producer of graphics research for USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, he's part of a team developing fully-immersive "war games" for military training.
"It's been great to be involved in a technology that's allowed filmmakers to do things they couldn't do before," says Borshukov, computer graphics supervisor for Electronic Arts, a leading videogame company. "The high point is for technology to be used by artists."
Paul Debevec's home page
Camillo Taylor's home page
George Borshukov's home page
Yizhou Yu's home page
Jitendra Malik's home page
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Updated 8/31/04.
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