I'm trying to bring light-fields to the masses, as the next level of VR immersive experiences. I'm building a cheap light-field video-camera and the software to process it automatically and reproduce the videos with a VR headset. BTW, not it's not just like a normal VR video because you have parallax.
Wow, I just looked up light-fields. That's a super cool idea. It would be incredible if it were possible to make a 3d light-field camera, so that the person watching it in VR could look all around them.
How do you deal with occlusion? I had the impression that’s the main issue with VR video, unless your recording rig has a massive horizontal offset to capture the sides.
You record the video from a matrix of cameras each at a slightly different pov, then use a light-field algorithm to generate novel images. As you said you only solve occlusion if your cameras are separated enough but in my case I only expect/want the user to twitch his head around. We can add more cameras if this tech starts get adopted.