Interactive 3D dense surface exploration in immersive virtual reality

Dense 3D reconstructions of real-world environments become wide spread and are foreseen to act as data base to solve real world problems, such as remote inspections. Therefore not only scene viewing is required but also the ability to interact with the environment,such as selection of a user-defined part of the reconstruction for later usage. However, inter-object occlusion is inherent to large dense 3D reconstructions, due to scene geometry or reconstruction artifacts that might result in object containment. Since prior art lacks approaches for occlusion management in environments that consist of one or multiple(large) continuous surfaces, we propose the novel technique Large Scale Cut Plane that enables segmentation and subsequent selection of visible, partly or fully occluded patches within a large 3D reconstruction, even at far distance. An immersive Virtual reality setup consisting of a Head-Mounted Display, a locomotion device (omni-directional treadmill)and a 6DOF-hand-tracking device are combined with the Large Scale Cut Plane technique to foster 3D scene understanding and natural user interactions. We furthermore present results from a user study where we investigate performance and usability of our proposed technique compared to a baseline technique. Our results indicate Large Scale Cut Plane to be superior in terms of speed and precision, while we found need of improvement of the user interface.