Inition provided an Organic Motion, Markerless Motion capture system for BBCs Bang Goes The Theory TV series, at one of their Roadshows in Edinburgh.
The Organic Motion stage was used as part of an experiment, using members of the public to see how people judge different peoples dancing abilities.
Hundreds of people used the system throughout the day, allowing memebers of the public to just walk into the space and be tracked straight away.
Organic Motion Stage
INITION says...
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Distant Thunder: Exploring Africa in 3D
World-renowned filmmakers Deeble & Stone partnered with Inition to co-produce a 3D wildlife pilot in Africa called Distant Thunder 3D.
The shoot took place in Kenya and was produced in association with equipment manufacturer P+S TECHNIK. During the production process the team identified and perfected the 3D rigs necessary to shoot wildlife in the field of Africa. Being an environment of widely varying scales, Inition used equally a large variety of interaxial lens distances to capture the extremities of the landscape, from extreme close ups of chameleons eating lunch to the final dramatic time-lapse sequence of the Kenyan night sky where two still cameras were positioned 30 metres apart.
Over the space of a month Inition used a variety of 3D rigs - both commercial models and custom built. These included mirror rigs, 3D time-lapse set ups, side-by-side configurations and gyro stabilized, using SI-2K Minicams and shooting uncompressed RAW, recording to solid state drives so full creativity could be achieved in the post production process.
Every evening, the team reviewed the daily rushes on a large 3D screen to develop what was working and what was not. Over a two week period and in challenging stormy condiitons, we obtained enough spectacular footage to edit together a stunning 10 minute pilot.
The promo premiered at the Dimension 3 S3D expo in Paris in 2010 and was later shown to audiences at the Berlin Film Festival 2010(?) and the Cannes Film Festival where it received a highly postive response.
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."
Remote Avatar: Gadget Show Virtual Pesenter Challenge
When the producers of North One Television approached 3D creative services company Inition to provide the technical expertise for an ambitious 'virtual presenter' challenge, LILA was an obvious solution.
LILA is a portable motion capture solution which was used to capture the motion of The Gadget Show presenter Suzi Perry in London and transmit that captured data to drive an avatar of Suzi who was composited in The Gadget Show studios, all in real time.
Marker-less Motion Capture
Based on real-time 3D animation software Autodesk MotionBuilder, LILA is Inition’s marker-less motion capture solution which can provide show stopping interactive installations for brands, exhibitions, tours and marketing agencies.
Without any calibration required, Suzi stepped into the holo-deck style cube at Inition’s London studios where her silhouette was tracked by 14 x 2D cameras. No markers or special clothing were required. The vision processor software calculated a 3D mesh of her body from these views of which a digital skeleton was applied using the Organic Motion plugin.
The frame-by-frame motion co-ordinates from the data was then transmitted to the MotionBuilder system at North One Television studios in Birmingham via a special driver which then applied Suzi Perry’s features such as clothes, hair, skin tones etc in real time. The avatar of Suzi which was composited into the studios of The Gadget Show next to the real co-presenter Otis and an android version of Jason Bradbury who she was competing with.
Suzi’s avatar character included full face expressions and mouth shapes driven by Suzi's voice fed through LILA's voice recognition software.
The composited footage was sent back to Inition’s London studios via Skype which Suzi could monitor on a screen seeing exactly what the public would see.
A World First
This project posed several challenges, not least because of the processing power required to deliver the avatar in real time. This was the first time a motion capture system had been used to drive another avatar over the Internet.
The LILA motion capture is a complete attention grabbing solution which is available for events, promotions and exhibitions. As well as hire of the LILA system itself, Inition also provide a complete production service with the hardware, software, and creative design of the characters, environments and interactions.