DEFINITION February 2019.pdf

FEATURE | R I CHARD MI LLS I NTERV I EW

One of the most interesting fields we’ve been involved in is volumetric capture

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 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. You said that Imaginary Pictures is focusing on capture. How is capture 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 changing in creating AR content?

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 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 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 – Tutankhamun’s tomb and the tombs in Amarna, plus about 20 artefacts and objects, ranging from Tutankhamun’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.

Can you explain what photogrammetry is?

Photogrammetry is constructing a scene from multiple photographic images. The photographs go into a modelling software, which generates the

ABOVE From practising surgical techniques to choosing a new table for your dining room, AR content is becoming an everyday tool.

62 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 20 1 9

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