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Coquitlam pair's video 'weaving' technology wins award

Imagine watching a live concert or Canucks game on TV and being able to rotate the camera angle 360 degrees and watch multiple views of the same event in real time.

Imagine watching a live concert or Canucks game on TV and being able to rotate the camera angle 360 degrees and watch multiple views of the same event in real time.

That's the dream two Coquitlam developers are working to make a reality with a new video stitching software called Veaver.

Combining the words "video" and "weaver," Veaver is the brainchild of Simon Fraser University professor Jie Liang and 25-year-old graduate student Andrew Au.

On May 4, the long-time Coquitlam residents were recognized with a BCNET Digital Media Challenge award and Au was invited to present their "multiview interactive video system" before a conference of B.C. software engineers and industry developers.

Partially funded by mobile phone maker Nokia, Veaver will work on any web browser and can assemble multiple user-generated YouTube videos of the same event into a single 360-degree video collage.

"Basically, it renders multiple videos instead of just one and fits them all into the right geographic perspective to make one moving 360-degree image," Au said. "It works much easier with pre-recorded videos but we're hopefully going to use it for live broadcast eventually."

Another practical use for the program is in surveillance video, Liang told The Tri-City News.

Current surveillance video software displays the views from each separate camera into different frames on a monitor. But Veaver would assemble them into one panoramic real-time image.

"If you look at a monitor with many small images, you don't know where there is a relationship between them," Liand explained. "So our software can easily arrange those videos according to their spatial relationship."

tcoyne@tricitynews.com