Elevating entertainment, education, and social networking experience through convergence of immersive video technologies (ELEVATE)

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Digital media are becoming interwoven into the fabric of our daily lives at an exponential rate, forming the backbone of content delivery systems in education, entertainment, social interaction, medical applications, and our living and working environments. However, the user's perception of digital content still falls short of a challenging benchmark-approximating their perception of the real world. For a truly immersive digital video viewing experience, the user must be engaged to the extent that they forget they are viewing an artificial environment, mediated by technology. Our goal is to enable such an immersive, engaging, lifelike viewing experience by integrating the respective advantages offered by three separate technologies currently reaching in this direction-3D (multiview) video, High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, and ultra-high definition (UHD). We will develop a comprehensive suite of new methods to efficiently capture, process, and display integrated 3D HDR UHD content, for viewing over any network and on a range of playback devices, from theatre screens to mobile phones. Provision will be made for seamless augmented reality enhancements when desired by an actively engaged user. Maximizing the viewer's level of engagement and comfort through user quality of experience testing will be an integral component of our work. The result will be an unsurpassed glasses-free, actively immersive and engaging viewing experience. Each stage will be guided and assessed by our industry partners to ensure the commercial viability of our research. The resulting leap in immersiveness will dramatically increase the impact of content being viewed, with profound implications for education and training, entertainment, social networking, advertising, and related sectors. Canadian educational institutions, and manufacturing, entertainment, and communications companies adopting this technology will gain a significant advantage over their competitors.