CasualVRVideos: VR videos from casual stationary videos

ABSTRACT Thanks to the ubiquity of devices capable of recording and playing back video, the amount of video files is growing at a rapid rate. Most of us have now video recordings of major events in our lives. However, until today, these videos are captured mainly in 2D and are mostly used for screen-based video replay. Currently there is no way for watching them in more immersive environments such as on a VR headset. They are simply not optimized for playback in stereoscopic displays or even tracked Virtual Reality devices. In this work, we present CasualVRVideos, a first approach that works towards solving these issues by extracting spatial information from video footage recorded in 2D, so that it can later be played back in VR displays to increase the immersion. We focus in particular on the challenging scenario when the camera itself is not moving.