‘I thought there
was nothing
behind me;
the world was
being painted as
I looked at it.
And if I could
turn around
quickly enough,
I might fool the
creator of these
paintings and
see the world
taking form.’
DAN SEARS ’ 74
Ramesh Raskar
’02 (PhD)
recalling his childhood
children have this notion. I thought there
was nothing behind me; the world was
being painted as I looked at it. And if I
could turn around quickly enough, I might
fool the creator of these paintings and see
the world taking form.”
But the fascination with the world as
painted scene persisted. It seems a naive
notion, but as he finished college in India
and worked his way through advanced
degrees at the University of Iowa and then
Chapel Hill, the young scientist realized it
was the core idea of virtual reality. The
computer paints the world only where you
are looking. Henry Fuchs was the catalyst
who sparked further ideas. Fuchs had created a mantra: Let’s learn to control light
every millimeter, every second. Lights, in
other words, can become “smart,” can be
turned into projectors to communicate and
inform. Fuchs spoke of using a “sea of
cameras” to project and reconstruct a 3-D
scene at a remote location.
Out of such thinking grew the “Office
of the Future,” a collaborative effort whose
UNC component is led by Fuchs and
Welch. The project investigates tele-immer-sion, replicating environments by projecting
information onto blank spaces that create a
The “Office of the Future,” at top, creates
virtual environments not unlike Raskar’s notion
of the world as painted scene. The man in the
foreground “meets” with the digitized image of
a woman in Armonk, N. Y., and another virtual
collaborator in Sitterson Hall. The project’s UNC
component is led by Raskar’s co-advisers, professors Greg Welch and Henry Fuchs, above.
