Optical Camouflage

[English / Japanese]

---

What is Optical Camouflage?

Optical camouflage is a kind of active camouflage.

This idea is very simple.If you project background image onto the masked object, you can observe the masked object just as if it were virtually transparent.

This shows the principle of the optical camouflage using X'tal Vision.You can select camouflaged object to cover with retroreflector.Moreover, to project a stereoscopic image, the observer looks at the masking object more transparent.

Optical camouflage can be applied for a real scene.In the case of a real scene, a photograph of the scene is taken from the operatorfs viewpoint, and this photograph is projected to exactly the same place as the original.Actually, applying HMP-based optical camouflage to a real scene requires image-based rendering techniques.

If you want to know the mechanism of this optical camouflage demonstration, please see the following brochure:

• M. Inami, D. Sekiguchi, S. Tachi, Le manteau transparent! (Transparent Cloak!), Brochure of Demonstration at Laval Virtual 2003, Laval Virtual 2003, France, May 13-18, 2003, (French Version), (English Version)

And you can find more detailed information at the pulication section.

Movies

mirror.mpg (915k)

oc-s.mpg (1.26M)

oc-phantom.mpg (1.66M)

oc-okugai3.mpg(700k)[New]

bone2.mpg(600k)
[New]

Publications

• S. Tachi, Telexistence and Retro-reflective Projection Technology (RPT), Proceedings of the 5th Virtual Reality International Conference (VRIC2003) pp.69/1-69/9, Laval Virtual 2003, France, May 13-18, 2003 (VRIC2003.pdf(432k))
• M. Inami, N. Kawakami, Y. Yanagida, T. Maeda and S. Tachi, Method and Device for Providing Information, US PAT. 6,341,869 , 2002
• M. Inami, N. Kawakami, D. Sekiguchi, Y. Yanagida, T. Maeda and S. Tachi, Visuo-Haptic Display Using Head-Mounted Projector, Proceedings of IEEE Virtual Reality 2000, pp.233-240, 2000 (vr2000.pdf(350k))

References

• M. Shiro, Ghost in the Shell, Kodansya, 1991

Projects of Tachi Lab.

Tachi Lab.