29 GENIUS INTERVIEW Richard Mills, Imaginary Pictures
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hardware? Are we going to move from phones to glasses? RICHARD MILLS: HoloLens through the last couple of years has been the pre-eminent device. Magic Leap shows great promise, and no doubt the field will be filled with more entrants over the next couple of years. I think this mixed reality and augmented reality that the glasses provide offers a level of accessibility that VR, with its closed-off-from-the-world style, doesn’t. But because there are so many mobile phones, that’s still a good entry into the market. You know if you have a good AR app that’s useful or entertaining or both, and it also works with a mobile phone it will have some traction. FEED: Does the mobile phone limit what the technology can accomplish? RICHARD MILLS: The technology in the phone is quite good. It will recognize what the foreground and background is. It’ll place the object in front of or behind real world objects, so you can take a selfie with it or take a picture of someone, and it can work out what the foreground and background is and place you and a virtual object in the appropriate places. These assets are fairly lightweight. One nice example is the Google Star Wars AR stickers for Android which feature multiple characters. They all interact with each other and interact with the viewer as well. If you approach them, they will run away or tell you to back off. If you add all those enhancements and create a bit of realism, people do engage quite nicely with it. The IKEA app is great too. It works in dimly lit rooms. It will match the lighting to
the scene. You can place furniture to see how it looks in your house. It’s got a pretty good measurement tool now too which you can measure the space with. All this is on the phone. FEED: You said that Imaginary Pictures is focusing on capture. How is capture changing in creating AR content? RICHARD MILLS: One of the most interesting fields we’ve been involved in is volumetric capture where you take an actor and capture the performance. But this is not like motion capture where someone wears a suit that then animates CGI assets. This is the actual performance captured in 360, captured from all directions, which can then be inserted into an application. We did consultancy a couple of years ago for a company called Factory 42. They built a VR app with Sir David Attenborough called Hold the World in which David is in London’s Natural History Museum sitting behind a desk. You can pick up a number of objects lying there and he’ll talk to you about them. Imaginary did the initial consultancy to figure out which of Factory 42’s four potential vendors had a product that would work for the project. Eventually the volumetric capture was done by Microsoft up in Seattle. Volumetric capture is very interesting, but it’s complex, it’s expensive and the resolution has to be chosen carefully to make sure it will work on certain platforms. Ideally you want to run it on something like the HTC Vive rather than a mobile device. We’ve moved on now to more lightweight forms of capture that are less demanding on processing power to play them. Volumetric capture assets are quite
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