Top Gear Live, the action-packed live version of the TV show, launched the first leg of its 2010 World Tour at Earls Court London earlier this month. This year the live show has been given another interactive makeover by Inition featuring a Mobile SMS Text competition and an interactive Cool Wall where the audience can rate cars and post comments.
The text-based competition is hosted by Inition and enables the crowd to text in answers to questions posed on the big screens on stage for a chance to win prizes. Top Gear’s Cool Wall also allows the audience to vote on whether cars are "cool" or "uncool" and post live comments which the presenters interact with. Inition also provides on-hand technical expertise to the International show which will play to over 300,000 spectators across seven cities around the world in the forthcoming months.
On previous shows Inition has worked with the show's producers to create a 3D animated dragon to do battle with the Stig. Last year Inition created the world’s largest mass audience participation driving game consisting of two on-screen supercars which were collectively steered left or right by audience members holding up red or green cards, with speed controlled by how much noise each side made – the louder the audience the faster the cars go.
This is now the fifth year in which Inition has collaborated with Top Gear Live to bring cutting edge interactive technology to the show format. Inition is involved at every stage of the project from concept development through to technology provision, customising software, content creation and programming. Full details and locations here: http://live.topgear.com/.
Ford C-MAX Launch Outdoor Augmented Reality Campaign
Inition Brings Mass Interaction to the Gadget Show Live
MagicSymbol Augmented Reality Application Launches Audi A1 Across UK
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.
MagicSymbol AR: Launch of the Audi A1
After highly successful MagicSymbol augmented reality campaigns for BMW, Toyota and Kia, Inition were approached to deliver a new augmented reality campaign to launch the Audi A1 in showrooms across the UK.
Visitors were able to interact with a photorealistic model of Audi’s new hatchback before its official launch. By holding up a special Audi branded ‘MagicSymbol’ printed in brochures in front of kiosks, software would recognise the symbol and augment a fully detailed 360 degree model of the A1 as if it were parked on the brochure held by the viewer.
Inition’s skilled animators created the detailed image and animations of the car in 3D Studio Max using references from Audi’s original CAD data which were optimised for real time rendering.
Using proprietary algorithms, Inition created a fully realistic experience with no lag between the movement of the MagicSymbol and animation of the car.
Extending the experience to the home
Inition also extended the experience to the home. Users with a webcam could download an Audi logo that had been specially encoded for use with the MagicSymbol augmented reality technology. By printing it off and holding it towards their webcam, users would see the Audi A1 appear on their monitor and be able to interact with the car's features as if they were in the showroom.
By rotating the MagicSymbol, the car would rotate too and users could explore the car further by clicking on any of the on-screen icons such as “add panoramic roof” and “open the boot”.
Audi were so pleased with the results that they commissioned Inition to create a similar campaign for the Audi A7 Sportback where Inition added even further interactive features such as the ability for the user to change the paint colour and take the car for a ‘virtual test drive' using the arrow keys on their keyboard.