Ernst Grube: A Contemporary Witness and His Memories Preserved with Volumetric Video

Abstract

''Ernst Grube - The Legacy'' is an immersive Virtual Reality documentary about the life of Ernst Grube, one of the last German Holocaust survivors. From interviews conducted inside a volumetric capture studio, dynamic full-body reconstructions of both, the contemporary witness and its interviewer, are recovered. The documentary places them in virtual recreations of historical sites and viewers experience the interviews with unconstrained motion. As a step towards the documentary's production, prior work presents reconstruction results for one interview. However, the quality is unsatisfying and does not meet the requirements of the historical context. In this paper, we take the next step and revise the used volumetric reconstruction pipeline. We show that our improvements to depth estimation and a new depth map fusion method lead to a more robust reconstruction process and that our revised pipeline produces high-quality volumetric assets. By integrating one of our assets into a virtual scene, we provide a first impression of the documentary's look and the convincing appearance of protagonists in the virtual environment.