FEATURE | R I CHARD MI LLS I NTERV I EW
Can you first tell us about Imaginary Pictures? Imaginary was founded just over two and a half years ago. My business partner Kevin Zemrowsky and I came from a feature film and TV visual effects background. We thought the best way to find a niche in the market was to specialise in capture – capture of scenes, capture of images, including ordinary camerawork and cinematography, but adding an air of science and research to find new methods of doing things. The business is supported partly by production services and partly by consultancy. We do a lot of consultancy work. One of our biggest clients is Sky UK. In the VFX world, we had been doing moving background plates in 360 and 180. Then VR came on the scene and it was an easy move into capturing 360 for that field. Then we took a little side turn to look at other ways of capture for the future, including creating assets for mixed reality, virtual reality and other applications. That included volumetric capture, motion capture and a variety of other things. Have we turned a corner in terms of the practical utility of AR content? Yes, it’s quite an interesting time for very augmented and mixed reality at the moment. We’re starting to get the benefits of research that was done two or three years ago. It’s starting to come into mobile products, some of which are gimmicky like Pokémon Go, others of which are actually quite useful. There are several things just on the cusp of becoming widespread, which are going to be really exciting. If you combine geolocation from GPS and augmented reality it gives you a really good view of, say, reconstructions of what the past might have looked like or visualisations of what the future might look like in a certain place. For entertainment, there are going to be lots of practical applications as well. Anything that has both engagement and a use is actually quite promising. There are a number of shopping apps, like Ikea’s, where you can previsualise the product in your home, or see yourself wearing an outfit before purchasing it. There are car configurators, which are one of the first spin-offs from the Google Tango project – you can see what different cars look like parked in your drive. They’re slightly gimmicky, but also useful. Judging by the number of articles and papers coming out of academia, educators are trying to pin together in a stable format GPS information and augmented reality so students can visualise how a city might have looked 100 or 200 years ago. And I know most of the big architecture firms have a VR department for visualisation.
Half of their offerings are done in a headset, and the other half are done with a mobile phone. Clients can not only see what the whole site might look like but details of the site as well. Where are you seeing the most interesting developments in AR hardware? Are we going to move from phones to glasses? 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. HoloLens through the last couple of years has been the pre-eminent Does the mobile phone limit what the technology can accomplish? The technology in the phone is quite good. It will recognise 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
You know if you have a good AR app that’s useful or entertaining or both, it will have some traction
IMAGES New generation AR apps can be practical tools for design, visualisation, medicine, study – and fun.
60 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 20 1 9
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