Volumetric video and the future of digital communications
It was not so long ago when virtual reality was almost science fiction. The Oculus Rift changed everything when it broke the Kickstarter crowdfunding record back in 2012. Nowadays, we could say that VR has almost reached the status of “mature” tech, with VR experiences and applications becoming increasingly interesting, engaging and immersive, every day. Now, augmented reality seems to be the tech which will change our lives, by re-defining the way we interact with digital media and the world around us. However, in order for this to happen, we need more ways to capture real-world content, suitable for VR & AR, which help blur the lines between virtual and real.
At Volograms, we believe that volumetric video (also known as 4D video) is the technology which will provide tools and content for the next generation of VR & AR experiences. We believe that volumetric video will shape the way we communicate and express ourselves in the future.
To capture high-quality volumetric video of a human performance you can either use multi-view camera setup or a set of depth sensors arranged to cover the performer from as many view points as possible. The reconstruction process uses computer vision algorithms to produce a set of 3D models that are arranged as a sequence, at least at 30 frames per second. These models are normally 3D meshes with their corresponding texture images, or very dense colored point clouds. As you can imagine, 30 meshes or point clouds per second can result in a massive amount of information, so encoding and compression play a very important role.
One of our objectives at Volograms is making this technology available for as many people and platforms as possible, so we have been working to integrate our volumetric video sequences (our volograms) on every platform; our volograms can be experienced in almost any VR headset, and we have also integrated it in some of the most popular AR headsets — hopefully we will get to try it on a Magic Leap One soon! Also, to bring it closer to consumers, we can adapt our volograms to be experienced in mobile AR applications, both in iOS and Android.
We have also explored other platforms with more restrictions on file size by introducing some tradeoffs with image resolution and polygonal mesh density. The most challenging was creating a Snapchat lens and making it publicly available (scan the code above!), as these lenses need be under 4MB!
Lastly, we are happy to work with new devices and platforms. For example, a few weeks ago, our friends from The Looking Glass Factory released their holographic display on Kickstarter (one of the coolest deviced we have seen in a long time!), so we worked with them to integrate one of our sequences. Isn’t it cool?
Volumetric video is a very exciting field with innumerable applications. If you want to know more about the field, or if you are interested in working with us, Give us a shout!
The Volograms Team
