vSLRcam – taking pictures in virtual environments

Abstract

Our work presents a virtual single lens reflection camera (vSLRcam) application which is employed in a virtual training environment for crime scene investigation. vSLRcam’s back-end is a GPU based simulation of a realistic camera model taking into account SLR camera properties like apperture, shutter speed, lens, etc., as well as their interdependencies. Thus, we can obtain realistic lens effects like motion blur or depth of field in real-time. The application user interface allows for parameterizing the inidividual camera attributes to achieve those effects and, as a result, to take realistic pictures of the scene. The resulting images come very close to real world photographs with equal parameter values. Our main contributions are a common framework for the SLR camera attributes and the simulation of their interdependecies in a single application which is capable of rendering photographic lens effects in real-time.