The Brief
To produce an immersive experience for the Henley River and Rowing museum that would allow visitors to experience a race in the Henley Regatta from the Cox's point of view.
Solution
Inition created a bespoke immersive 360 degree experience using a head-mounted display. Two races were shot at the Henley Royal Regatta and Women's Regatta. In order to capture the all the action, the races were shot using a custom designed 360 filming rig, mounted in the stern of the boat where the Cox would normally sit.
Museum visitors wearing the installed head-mounted display which, thanks to a precision intertial tracking, allowed them to look around through a full 360 degrees of the action. A stereo sound track was also created with audio recorded from the races.
Post-production took place at Inition's and involved a conversion of captured 'donut' high definition video into 360° panoramic format. Inition also developed the software to view the 360° video inside a head-mounted display and interface to the tracking system.
Inition Create Immersive 360° Experience for River and Rowing Museum
Inition Instigate Europe’s Largest In-Store 3D Screen Network
Inition Powers World’s First Virtual Presenter Face-Off
Inition worked with The Gadget Show to create and drive an avatar of the show's presenter Suzi P
Inition Supports Top Gear Live Show Fifth Year in a Row
Top Gear Live, the action-packed live version of the TV show, launched the first leg of its 2010
De Beers 3D Film for Window Installations
Inition's sister company Holition partnered with 3D film production experts Pointy Stick to shoot a beautifully art directed promotional film detailing De Beers most dramatic pieces. The 3D film was displayed on a lenticular screens in London, New York and Tokyo, which do not require 3D viewing glasses. The first film was deployed globally, and a second film commissioned for Christmas 2010.
Technical Production
Inition provided stereoscopic expertise for the shoot and throughout post-production on what was a technically challenging 3D workflow requiring 8 individual camera views (rather than the standard left/right for 'normal' stereoscopic 3D) to allow deployment on Alioscopy glasses-free screens, supplied and configured by Inition.
Post production for auto-stereoscopic (glasses-free) live action films is a complex business, requiring effectively 8 separate timelines, each from a slightly different perspective. Retouching and rig removal are a particular challenge.
Deployment
100,000 people stopped and viewed the screen in the first four days of launch. The significant PR exposure that resulted helped lift perceptions of De Beers above those of being a typical jeweller and into the realms of innovative thinkers engaging their consumers with originality and creativity. The film has been previewed in New York and London and China.
"We are delighted with the quality of the production and the ability of the Alioscopy screens to stop people in their tracks. Feedback from Japan has been amazing. The campaign has generated a lot of interest and intrigue into the appearance of the diamonds in 3D and also into the technology that makes it possible." said Robert Cheng, De Beers Marketing Director
Check out Holition's site at www.holition.com and Pointy Stick at www.pointystickfilms.com
Gadget Show Live
The producers of the UK’s largest consumer electronics show – The Gadget Show Live, worked closely with Inition to develop ideas and technical solutions to engage the show’s audience in groundbreaking, fun and genuinely new ways.
Inition operates a busy R&D department which always sets out to go beyond the standard brief and for The Gadget Show Live, we developed bespoke software and technical solutions to achieve just that. We developed a unique vote capture system, a mass interactive game and a motion capture showpiece.
Flash Camera Voting
In a signature Gadget Show challenge, two of the presenters went head to head to win over the audience with a singing performance. Rather than asking people to vote for their favourite performer via SMS, Inition created a voting system that could register an individual’s preference via a flash from their camera phone.
Within two seconds, a camera rig on the stage captured each flash of light/vote which was processed by proprietary software developed by Inition Creative Production (? - IS THAT RIGHT). The system was able to register and count each vote and present the results graphically on large LED screens within 15 seconds.
Robust and highly accurate, our reliable system could even detect (and disregard) multiple votes from a single individual up to 80 metres away. It is highly scalable too. With more cameras, we could even increase the field of view of the rig up to 360 degrees and register the votes of tens of thousands of audience members up to 150 metres away and beyond.
Mass Drone Gaming
For the mass drone gaming section, a divided audience competed with the other half in a challenge to steer a mini drone towards a circle on a large LED screen using the motion of their arms and pitch of their voices. The winning team would be the one best able to co-ordinate their arm movements and voices as detected by the Inition sensors. Three standard 720p USB webcams were housed in a single rig angled in multiple directions. Rewritten drivers and settings would achieve the desired framerates. Inition’s own software, based on proprietary and various open source libraries, could accurately translate the motion of people's gesticulations to guide the flying drone towards a target. Further software was able to detect the pitch of vocal noises from the installed microphones - the higher the pitch, the higher the drone would fly.
A Virtual Strip
To get Suzi's avatar to do the strip, Jason entered the marker-less LILA system which is portable enough to be easily rigged up on stage. Jason mimed the start of the strip up until a key moment when an Inition developed animation of a Suzi Perry avatar stripping to a bare wireframe model seamlessy blended into Jason's real time avatar motion.
Conclusion
The Gadget Show Live event was regarded as a huge success receiving exceptional feedback from the audience, producers and even the presenters themselves. The system we used for the Gadget Show Live is part of our growing collection of mass audience interaction software called 'TAP' which features audience movement detection and sound processing for control, driving games with coloured steering wheels and quizzes.
Inition will be running a 'TAP' quiz event in Rome at the end of august which will use coloured voting cards and we are currently in talks with largescale live event organisers which will run up to the end of the year.
Inition’s 3D Dragon versus The Stig at Top Gear Live
Following the success and popularity of 3D (deployed by Inition) at MPH 05 and 06, MPH’07 producer Rowland French approached Inition for a new 3D extravaganza: ‘The GATSO Dragon’. MPH (now Top Gear Live) is a unique concept including a live theatrical car show, hosted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.
Inition were briefed to produce a spectacular in-your-face 3D short film to be choreographed with on-stage action of The Stig (the mystery test driver) doing battle with the 3D Dragon. The various stages of the project are documented below.
Concept.
"The year is 2050, and the Government has gone mad. A small resistance of petrol heads do their best to fight Baby Blair’s army wherever they can. Leader of the resistance is The Stig; top of the Government's Most Wanted, he roams like a road warrior battling traffic wardens and mobile speed cameras where he can. In response to his success, the Government has designed a new type of mobile speed camera – something more frightening and devious than anything seen before: GATSO Dragon".
Inition’s concept artists got to work for various treatments of the GATSO Dragon developing ideas and direction:
The Show.
Inition provided a 3DVidBoxHD playback server, high-transmission polarising filters, a 40-feet-wide silver screen and over 100,000 pairs of 3D glasses for the show. Inition technicians supervised the 3D installation at the show and operated the playback for all 20 shows (to date). The 3D sequence ran flawlessly in every show.
We asked the client for some feedback on the MPH project and a quote for the story….
"Inition are fucking brilliant; if you want the best 3D in the UK, you'd be mad to use anyone else", said Rowland French, Producer of MPH 07.
Rowland went on to say: "Often the greatest working disappointments as a producer are when the reality of something bears little or no relation to what you had in your head. It's easy to design giant fighting koala bears in your mind, but who is going to make them?
"The same sense of foreboding haunted me when I came up with the idea of making a giant 3D dragon to fight The Stig, live in the MPH arena. Not complex enough already, the dragon had to be from the future, with armaments to deploy in the scrap, armour to be blown off - and most importantly had to have enough character in its face and movement to almost be a 'fourth presenter'.
"Inition were as excited as me about the idea, and organised plenty of artist meetings where we could discuss the dragons look. Once they had my barmy outline, they then started supplying their own drawings, and slowly the dragon in my head came to life on paper. Their seemingly limitless patience was never tested by my constant 'eyes need to be further apart' and 'the wings should beat slower' redesigns.
"When I finally sat down in their subterranean lair in East London, and watched the exact dragon from the middle of my head bob and flap in 3D in front of me, I was speechless. The dragon was all I could have hoped for, its movements were totally animalistic, its look perfectly well-worn futuristic. Jump to the first performance in Earls Court and The Stig tears around evading rockets and razor edged parking tickets, the audience ducking the stereo moments and jumping as the rockets cue with huge pyrotechnics on the floor. Inition had graced me with a beautiful baby dragon, and I was as proud a father as you could imagine."
Virtual Botox: Haptic App Simulates Injecting The Real Thing
Allergan, the company who make Botox, needed a simulator to allow doctors to practise injecting botox for treating muscle spasm. Inition worked with InViVo Communications to develop a PC-based haptic simulator to allow doctors to feel an accurate representation of the sensations involved in piercing the skin and the layers of muscle underneath.
We built the system around Sensable's high-end Phantom Desktop device. This device can simulate sensations of touch very accurately through a pen-like device attached to an articulated arm. We designed and 3D printed out a custom attachment for the device using our in-house 3D printer that enabled the haptic device to be controlled by a hyperdermic needle, producing a realistic interface for doctors.
After real-life training to get a feel for the 'real thing', our team designed a virtual 3D human bust with realistic muscle structure to act as a 'Guinea Pig' for our the simulation. Bespoke simulation software designed by Inition allowed users the freedom to view the patient from any angle, peel away layers of virtual skin to reveal the muscle structure beneath and ultimately practice injecting into the muscles with accurate force-feedback sensations of the elasticity and piercing of the skin. Under tuition, doctors can be assessed as to the accuracy of their aim thanks to a point mark being left behind at the point of injection.
Our simulation was used at pharmaceutical exhibitions around the World with enthusiastic reception from the experts in the field.