22 TECHFEED Augmented Reality ools that enable broadcasters to create virtual objects that appear as if they’re really in the studio have been available for years,
but improvements in fidelity, camera tracking and the fusion of game engine renders with live footage has seen augmented reality go mainstream. Miguel Churruca, Marketing and Communications director at 3D graphics systems developer Brainstorm, explains: “AR is a very useful way of providing in- context information and enhancing live images while improving and simplifying the storytelling. Examples of this can be found in election nights and entertainment and sports events, where a huge amount of data must be shown in-context and in a format that is understandable and appealing to the audience.” Virtual studios typically broadcast from a green screen set, but AR comes into play where there is a physically built set in the foreground, and augmented graphics and props placed in front of the camera. Some scenarios might have no physical props at all with the presenter interacting solely with graphics. “Apart from the quality of the graphics and backgrounds, the most important challenge is the integration and continuity of the whole scene,” says Churruca. “Having tracked cameras, remote locations and graphics moving with perfect integration, perspective matching and full broadcast continuity are essential to providing the audience with a perfect viewing experience.” The introduction of games engines, such as Epic’s Unreal Engine or Unity, brought photorealism into the mix. Originally designed to quickly render polygons, textures and lighting in video games, these engines can seriously improve the graphics, animation and physics of conventional broadcast character generators and graphics packages.
K/DA IS A VIRTUAL GIRL GROUP CONSISTING OF SKINS OF FOUR POPULARCHARACTERS INLEAGUEOFLEGENDS
VIRTUAL POP/STARS Last year a dragon made a virtual
Riot Games tapped Oslo-based The Future Group (TFG) to bring K/DA to life for the opening ceremony of the League Of Legends World Championship Finals at South Korea’s Munhak stadium. The show would feature the real life singers performing their K/DA song Pop/ Stars onstage with the animated K/DA characters. Riot provided TFG with art direction and models of the K/DA characters. Los Angeles post house Digital Domain supplied the motion capture data for the group, with TFG completed K/DA facial expressions, hair, clothing, texturing and realistic lighting. “We didn’t want to make the characters too photorealistic,” says Lawrence Jones, Executive Creative Director at TFG. “They needed to be stylised, yet still believable. That meant getting them to track to camera and having the reflections and shadows change realistically with the environment. It also meant their interaction with the real pop stars onstage had to look convincing.” All the animation, camera choices and cuts were pre-planned, pre-visualised and entirely driven by timecode to sync with the music. “Frontier is our version of the Unreal Engine which we have made for broadcast and real-time compositing. It enables us to synchronise the graphics with the live signal frame accurately. It drove the big monitors in the stadium (for fans to view the virtual event live) and it drove the real world lighting and pyrotechnics.” Three cameras were used, all with
appearance as singer Jay Chou performed at the opening ceremony for the League of Legends final at Beijing's famous Birds Nest Stadium. This year, the developer Riot Games wanted to go one better and unveil a virtual pop group singing live with their real world counterparts. K/DA is a virtual girl group consisting of skins of the four popular characters in League of Legends. Their vocals are provided by a cross-continental line-up of flesh and blood music stars: US-based Madison Beer and Jaira Burns, who both got their start on YouTube channels, and Miyeon and Soyeon from K-pop girl group (G)I-DLE. It’s a bit like what Gorillaz and Jamie Hewlett have been up to for years, except it’s happening live on a stage in front of thousands of fans.
LAWRENCE JONES “We didn’t want to make the characters too photorealistic. They needed to be stylised yet believable”
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