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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

This is amazing, but...

It feels too damned clean, and I'm not sure its just the weirdly alien camera stability.

it's exactly the camera work, this is a camera on a spline that has been heavily smoothed, a trick used in a lot of vfx work is recording ACTUAL camera movement (put a brick on an iphone to simulate the camera weight and 3d track the motion) and using that in a separate project to create a feeling of believable "there-ness"

There's no doubt that's part of it, but it's not all - I think it's the stillness.

A little bit of motion blur would go a long way here.

It's just really horrible camera work. Rolling the camera like that only makes sense when it corresponds with acceleration, but here every corner has a lot of camera roll and the amount is not correlated with the movement. That induces motion sickness, which is why it feels bad to look at despite excellent image quality.

A piece of commentary I'm less sure of is that there seems to be a total lack of motion blur, which is not what we've come to expect out of video

I think the 'bad' camera work is because the camera route is probably hard coded coordinates in a python script, and someone has done trial and error to try and find some set of paths that don't pass through stuff...

Indeed, but that path code should just keep the perspective upright to avoid causing motion sickness

This is just a raw result of many frames strung together from a view synthesis technique, with an arbitrary, programmer-designed camera path. Neither of these issues is fundamental to the technique:

- The camera path could be anything, and nicer ones could be easily designed by an artist - Motion blur is just a matter of supersampling in time. You actually don't want blur in the base reconstruction of individual views, as that would mean loss of detail when you were sitting still.

In short, this video is not meant to show the output you'd actually want for an application (which might be different for a movie vs. VR vs. something else), but just to distill many outputs from a view synthesis algorithm into a form easily digestible by a human reviewer.

Right, I fully agree with you, I was just trying to explain my perception of why it doesn’t look like a video when the outputs are clearly fantastic and high fidelity.

Due to Nyquist, it will be missing specular reflections with high angular frequency, which gives everything a dull, "satin" texture. You will never see anything "twinkle", "sparkle", or "glitter" in one of these, nor will mirrors likely be accurate. You can see this right in the beginning of the video, center frame - a mirror has an odd, blurry texture. You can see it again more subtly in the kitchen - it's full of reflective objects, in a room with bright overhead spotlights, and yet we never see sharp highlights. Diffuse highlights, sure, but nothing goes 'ting'.

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