Barriers to XR Adoption in Virtual Production — Part 6

And how to get past them — A guide for users

This series is an extension of an article by Nils Porrmann, Thomas Kother and myself posted at dandelion + burdock
You can read the full article at the frame:work website

Skills Acquisition Part II

Final thoughts on XR evolution

Those of you have now jumped to the end of the series to look for a simple ‘how to’ summary, I will leave you sadly unsatisfied. What I will review is the outline of learning ahead of you:

New Software
New Hardware
Expanded features of software/hardware you already work with
Budgeting strategy
Schedule strategy
Team Building
Leadership Training

You are not going to learn all these things at once nor should you expect to be an expert in all of these factors. I only want to reinforce that there is a significant amount of learning for the community to adapt to these tools and change effectively for XR Production to be successfully adopted.

Instead of a ‘how-to’ let’s look at why we should go through this learning process.

Your old job isn’t coming back anytime soon. Broadway is slowly going to start reestablishing shows for reduced audience sizes in June 2021. Live concert touring will start to recover with small shows in the same timeframe. TV & Film production has some life, but nothing like it was 10 months ago. Many talented production professionals will not be able to wait. Many will find other jobs, and won’t come back to their prior fields. This will mean a years long recovery process to the quality of live entertainment that was produced in early 2020.

When shows do come back, audiences will lag. We have to rebuild trust about safe social activities, large crowds and travel. This means the focus on entertainment production will be on delivering engaging experiences people can enjoy and interact with at home.

We still have yet to solve that audience interaction piece and Zoom is wearing thin. I think great discoveries are still ahead of us as we build virtual productions for truly live events.

I see a glimmer of hope that production companies are willing to invest to make Virtual Production and XR Production possible. Every successful event means more producers want these tools. These first ones are hard. I see my peers going through unimaginable levels of exhaustion blazing this trail. But momentum is building. XR will get easier thanks to their hard work, and the hard work of the developers creating the systems that make XR possible.

When the entertainment world can get back to normal, these tools won’t go away. They will keep evolving into hybrid forms for live experiences. Virtual Production will easily keep growing in the film world. Learning these tools can only expand your opportunities.

There is no short term lifespan for this learning investment. This is a revolution. Join us.

Laura Frank
Founder
frame:work

frame:work is a community platform for video professionals working in live and virtual production

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My thanks to Nils Porrmann of dandelion + burdock and Matthew Ward of Superlumenary for helping review this article

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Further Reading

Virtual Production: Exactly Where to Start by Drew Viehmann
Mixed Reality Studios: a primer for producers by Dandelion & Burdock

GLOSSARY

Virtual Production
The use of one or any combination of real-time content manipulation technologies that make background and foreground content responsive to camera point of view

Background Replacement
Real-time content generation of the background of a scene using camera position data. The resulting content can either be fed to an LED Wall or used to live composite a scene using a green screen.

AR
Real-time generation of content in the foreground of a scene, overlaid onto a shot using camera position data.

XR (miXed Reality)
A subset of Virtual Production that mixes background replacement with AR. Sometimes referred to as MR.

Scenic Extension
Expansion of a LED Background Replacement workflow that digitally continues the background image that would exist beyond the LED Wall

Virtual Production Solutions:

The following matrix is an outline of current virtual production solutions and their capabilities. This list is based on the company websites of the products listed below. I expect there are errors and welcome your feedback to make this list an exact outline of the current state of Virtual Production technologies.

SYSTEM LINKS:
7th Sense
AI
Brainstorm
disguise
Green Hippo
ioversal
Light Act
Modulo Pi
Pixera
Pixotope
Real Motion
Smode
Touch Designer
vizrt
VYV Photon
Zero Density
Notch
Unreal

CAMERA TRACKING SYSTEMS:
Encoder based:
Mo-sys
StypeKit
Wifi with infrared active beacons:
Vive
Markerless:
N-Cam
Vanishing Point
IR-camera sensors of passive tracking points:
Blacktrax
Mo-sys StarTracker
OptiTrak
Stype
Vicon Tracker
VYV Albion