# A System for Acquiring, Processing, and Rendering Panoramic Light Field Stills for Virtual Reality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.08860 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08860/

## Key facts

- Cited by 24 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Hallucinated Neural Radiance Fields in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15246/) (2021)
- [HDR-NeRF: High Dynamic Range Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14451/) (2021)
- [T"oRF: Time-of-Flight Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scene View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15271/) (2021)
- [VR-NeRF: High-Fidelity Virtualized Walkable Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02542/) (2023)
- [Balanced Spherical Grid for Egocentric View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12408/) (2023)
- [PanSplat: 4K Panorama Synthesis with Feed-Forward Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12096/) (2024)
- [Real Acoustic Fields: An Audio-Visual Room Acoustics Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18821/) (2024)
- [Local Implicit Ray Function for Generalizable Radiance Field Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12746/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Light Field Rendering with Deep Anti-Aliasing Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06797/) (2021)
- [3D Scene Geometry Estimation from 360^circ Imagery: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09252/) (2024)
- [4DGCPro: Efficient Hierarchical 4D Gaussian Compression for Progressive Volumetric Video Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17513/) (2025)
- [Casual 6-DoF: free-viewpoint panorama using a handheld 360 camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16756/) (2022)
- [NTIRE 2023 Challenge on Light Field Image Super-Resolution: Dataset, Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10415/) (2023)
- [OmniLocalRF: Omnidirectional Local Radiance Fields from Dynamic Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00676/) (2024)
- [LGFN: Lightweight Light Field Image Super-Resolution using Local Convolution Modulation and Global Attention Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17759/) (2024)
- [Geo-NI: Geometry-aware Neural Interpolation for Light Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09736/) (2022)
- [Stereo Unstructured Magnification: Multiple Homography Image for View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00156/) (2022)
- [A GPU-Accelerated Light-field Super-resolution Framework Based on Mixed Noise Model and Weighted Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05047/) (2022)
- [View Adaptive Light Field Deblurring Networks with Depth Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06860/) (2023)
- [Stereo-Knowledge Distillation from dpMV to Dual Pixels for Light Field Video Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11823/) (2024)
- [Real-Time Position-Aware View Synthesis from Single-View Input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14005/) (2024)
- [SANR: Scene-Aware Neural Representation for Light Field Image Compression with Rate-Distortion Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15775/) (2025)
- [STAR: Structure-aware Test-time Adaptation for diffusion-based light field Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.19747/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a system for acquiring, processing, and rendering panoramic light field still photography for display in Virtual Reality (VR). We acquire spherical light field datasets with two novel light field camera rigs designed for portable and efficient light field acquisition. We introduce a novel real-time light field reconstruction algorithm that uses a per-view geometry and a disk-based blending field. We also demonstrate how to use a light field prefiltering operation to project from a high-quality offline reconstruction model into our real-time model while suppressing artifacts. We introduce a practical approach for compressing light fields by modifying the VP9 video codec to provide high quality compression with real-time, random access decompression. We combine these components into a complete light field system offering convenient acquisition, compact file size, and high-quality rendering while generating stereo views at 90Hz on commodity VR hardware. Using our system, we built a freely available light field experience application called Welcome to Light Fields featuring a library of panoramic light field stills for consumer VR which has been downloaded over 15,000 times.