Visual blending using 2D morphing

Visual surrealism has been used with great success in movies and arts. Surrealistic cues provide a way to convey more information than what is directly available to the senses. Primary use of surrealism in movies and arts has been to provide quick and effective communication. So far, the use of surrealism has been very limited in the area of virtual environments. Great strides have been made to provide both the real time interaction and graphical-realism in virtual environments. Real-time interaction and realism are both complimentary and computationally expensive. They are seldom available simultaneously in a virtual environment. Thus it is easy to break the continuity of experience in a virtual environment today. In this paper, we explore the use of morphing technique for surrealism in virtual environments. An extension to the well known field morphing technique has been implemented. We provide examples of smooth camera movement using only two images from different views. We also provide realistic arm motion animation using only a few time varying video-frames. Later we provide examples of natural scenes where the initial and final images are identical. A huge gain in surrealistic information is obtained.