HUGO BOSS, the first global company to use an iPhone and Volu to create content for a media campaign
Reboot the Night is not only top-fashion-brand HUGO’s latest campaign. It is also a global first at the bleeding-edge of technological innovation: a global company using mobile volumetric captures to virtually produce media assets.
“We’re going from URL to IRL — and you’re invited”. With that idea in mind, Reboot the Night wanted to showcase the brand’s new “technical club-inspired creations”. What better way of doing so than mixing real and digital life thanks to virtual production?
As it was about virtual production, one would expect that a high-end media studio was going to be needed to capture the 3D assets. But HUGO took one innovative step further: this new Night could not be a perfectly designed one coming out of a stage, it should be a freshly improvised story created by all of us and captured as we do, with our smartphones, on the streets, in the places we live.
When HUGO got in touch and explained that they wanted to use Volu to create some of the media assets for the campaign, we freaked out! At that stage, we were only evaluating the possibility of exporting Volu’s mobile volumetric captures theoretically, to make them available for a few small-scale pilot use-cases.
Of course, we were aware of Volu’s advantages. First, the capture process couldn’t be more simple: same as a quick mobile video. The 3D recording is not anymore restricted to studio contexts — it happens anywhere the talent is available. Second, the costs of using an app and processing a few mobile sequences simply does not compare to professional volumetric productions. In that way, HUGO’s team enjoy the flexibility of capturing — wherever they wanted — many different volumetric sequences, avoiding the extraordinary costs related with every second of traditional 3D creations. Of course, the quality obtained with a single smartphone doesn’t compete (yet!) with professional studio-based solutions, but it suited perfectly the needs of the campaign — as it suits the needs of many use-cases we are exploring since then.
While the virtual production of mobile volograms had never been tried before, HUGO’s top-talented Digital Creation team, made of 3D artists and creative professionals, was ready for the challenge!
Interested in the technical details? In fact they are pretty simple: first, the team captured tens of volograms (volumetric sequences) with an iPhone and our app, Volu. Second, those captures got automatically processed into 3D. Third and final, with their standard production pipeline, the Digital Creation team at HUGO BOSS used the 3D assets, in the shape of OBJs and textures, to create the videos. Fun fact: we enabled the capture of longer sequences for them through a private version of Volu — the app currently limits volograms to 5s, but we are already evaluating the possibility of extending this feature to all our users.
The result was a set of really fun videos for social media that perfectly fit in with the creative idea of Reboot the Night. As most were published as ephemeral stories, only one remains publicly accessible on HUGO’s Instagram profile — enjoy!
We are extremely thankful to HUGO’s team for their trust. You have made digital history! The next few months will see a few selected AR and VR apps and other projects piloting the export and integration of Volu’s mobile volumetric captures, following the path trailblazed by HUGO. In future, everything, from applications for current and upcoming XR glasses, to all kinds of metaverses and 3D video-games will benefit from the presence of real people, powered by mobile volumetric capture.
If you are interested in bringing in volumetric captures into your immersive or 3D product or projects and have an exciting use-case in mind, please get in touch. We will soon start working along a focus group made of professionals, prosumers, and artists to gather information that will shape our future export feature and define important aspects of it like integrations, format conversion tools, support mechanisms, etc. And, once ready, we will work with them to test more exciting use-cases. Please follow and stay tuned! Thanks for reading!
