INDUSTRY ICONS
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Part of Sphere’s Aston Martin collaboration, projected from the venue’s huge exterior
There was also an Audi project for the OMR Festival in Hamburg, a huge marketing conference. We developed an interactive experience in which people could sit in car seats, then they would have screens come down around them and would ‘drive’ through a live rendered scene which could react to the moods of each person. We had face detection paired with mood detection, which was really cool. There was even a heartbeat sensor which also influenced the visuals shown. The environment would change when someone’s heart rate went up or down. The mood detection would check if they were happy, sad, scared or something in between. It was great to create this unique experience. We also had limited time, as is usually the case with these commercial projects, where you’re also working with limited resources. To make this all work in such a short time frame and turn it into a cool experience that everyone loved was fantastic. What do you think the future of VR tech holds? That’s a good question. I still think it’s underused because it’s a medium where you can spatially interact with 3D content. What would be ideal is to have lightweight glasses or contact lenses that give you the option to add a digital layer to your peripheral and collaborate with others in it. The future is definitely going to be less about bulky headsets and more towards virtual content in the physical world in everyday life, for immersive experiences in entertainment and education. How are developments in AI technology impacting your work? I’m very optimistic about Generative AI, maybe more so than others in my
industry. There are quite a few sceptics around, especially in the animation sector of the industry, and some people discard it and don’t want to use it at all for their own good reasons. It’s having a lot of impact at the moment because there is so much new stuff coming out, even day-by-day. But I think there’s some good use cases, and that the need for digital content is higher than ever. I don’t see it as this thing that’s going to take our jobs. It’s more going to supplement our jobs, and can be utilised to give us new tools and freedom to experiment with new methods. I’m generally more open to this than others might be. Then, there are the large language models, such as GPT-4/ChatGPT or Deepseek. I use ChatGPT like everyone else, I think – mainly for getting clear, structured answers to specific questions without having to browse through different online resources; to help with specific coding problems or organising data. I try to use it more and more for
manual, labour-intensive tasks that would distract me from the actual work. I think AI will be at the centrepiece of everything we do and how we use tools going forward. We’re probably not going to be talking about AI as much in ten years’ time because it’s just going to be everywhere. In the future, it’s going to be obvious that some AI is involved in whatever you do. Do you have any other projects on the horizon for 2025? On the topic of AI, I want to do a deep dive into Gaussian splatting next. I’ve seen with these neural renderings that there’s still a lot of potential there for live entertainment or immersive experiences. I have some other projects floating around, but nothing is set in stone just yet that I can talk about. My goal is to work on more amazing live shows and immersive/interactive XR projects this year – anything that’s not been done before and is technically challenging.
Audi’s OMR installation featured an immersive, reactive virtual drive, experienced from its plush seats
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