30 GENIUS INTERVIEW Richard Mills, Imaginary Pictures
heavy duty, so in some cases it’s better to have CGI constructs to provide a lower processing overhead. A combination of CGI assets and volumetric capture assets in the same space can work quite well. The other type of capture which works well for both AR and VR is scene capture. We did quite a lot of this in a project last year for Sky where we captured a number of tombs in the Valley Of The Kings in Egypt – Tutankhamen’s tomb and the tombs in Armana, plus about 20 artefacts and objects, ranging from Tutankhamen’s gold coffin to stones, tablets, and brooches. These were captured using photogrammetry, and then presented as objects for use either in AR or VR. RICHARD MILLS: Photogrammetry is constructing a scene from multiple photographic images. The photographs go into a modelling software which generates the geometry of the scene, and then clads it with the photographs. You can produce a photo realistic rendition of a scene and realistic objects. These go particularly well with virtual reality. For instance, in the production for Sky, a number of tablets with hieroglyphs on them were captured. These went into a virtual reality production and you could interact with them, pick them up, look at them, turn them over, have the inscriptions on them translated for you. A very useful technique. FEED: Can you explain photogrammetry?
FIRST AR-DER An alliance of creativity and tech could mean a new hope for augmented reality smart phone content
FEED: What are the main platforms for delivering AR content? RICHARD MILLS: First, there are two main frameworks, Unity and Unreal, and most apps are built within these frameworks. There a couple of others as well but they’re mainly one of these two simply because a lot of work and development has gone into them. In the mobile and PC worlds Unity is probably ahead, but Unreal engine is being used quite effectively by the broadcast industry. Nowadays, TV production, certainly sports coverage, will use a number of 3D assets. You can take player profiles in football, which are scanned assets of the footballers, and parade them up and down, animate them out into the frame and so forth. Years ago, they were just flat images on the screen. Most of that work is done in Unreal within the graphics engine, which is normally a Vizrt platform. We’re seeing
WE’RE STARTING TOGET THE BENEFITSOF RESEARCH THAT WASDONE TWOORTHREEYEARSAGO
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