3D Virtual Reality Placing Live Action into the Virtual World Andrew Butler, Product Manager, Vinten Radamec
Programme makers are increasingly pushing technical and creative boundaries in a drive to reduce costs and offer ever more attractive content. Today, they have a vast range of tools at their disposal to help achieve these objectives including computer generated graphical elements that vary from simple foreground stationary graphics to fully immersive 3D virtual reality (VR) environments.
VR is becoming increasingly popular in the broadcast world and has been deployed in a wide range of applications. Its use is particularly prevalent in children’s television where live action is often combined with virtual reality.
In Bamzooki Street Rules, for example, four teams of children design their own “zooks” – 3D computer-generated creatures – which compete with each other in a range of challenges. The zooks and their games are generated in real time, and the production design submerges the teams in what appears to be four floors of an industrial building.
News and current affairs programmes have also achieved high impact results by using VR elements extensively. Coverage of the recent UK General Election, for example, featured a multi camera virtual set and a 3D “swingometer”, combined with a model of the House of Commons and a data table touch screen.
There is also growing use of VR graphics in live outside broadcasts, and particularly in sports. This has evolved from placing team logos on the pitch, to showing the distance to the pin in golf or the length of a kick in rugby and adding a ‘virtual’ offside line in football, or tracking the world record pace in athletics or swimming.
In all of these cases, the ability to interact between real and virtual elements is key in stimulating the audience’s interest and adding value to the viewing experience.
The success of this approach relies on ensuring the virtual elements precisely correspond to the real objects on the set. And to achieve this, all camera movements must be captured then tracked and communicated back to the computer that is rendering the graphic. This ensures the correct viewpoint is obtained.
This approach to tracking has a vital role to play in 2D and 3D environments. For example, Vinten Radamec offers manual and robotic tracking solutions for both which deliver excellent physical and tracking performance.
This kind of precision tracking is a complex requirement. Digital lenses provide zoom and focus data, but the rest of the information must come from the camera support equipment. Significant innovation is needed to
32
deliver the location and angle with the required degree of precision. In some applications, the graphics system can be used to control the cameras through studio robotics. In most cases, however, cameras are flexible, either controlled as a group by a single operator at the robotic controller, or moved on tripods or pedestals by individual operators. In each scenario, the need for precision location remains and so the encoding of the camera support is an equally key requirement.
A Perfect Solution to Pan and Tilt
The simplest case is when the camera is free to pan and tilt but is fixed in location on a heavy-duty tripod or post.
Production values cannot be sacrificed simply because virtual reality elements are involved and it is critical that camera support movement is smooth. That means ease of counter-balance, perfect balance to ensure the camera can be left at any tilt angle, and infinitely adjustable fluid drag for both pan and tilt.
The best solution is to take an established, market leading professional pan and tilt head and add precision encoding. In the case of Vinten Radamec, they offer encoded versions of several of the most popular Vinten heads. The most recent, the Vector 750i, offers an accuracy of around 1/5000th of a degree in both pan and tilt, without changing the performance, or the external physical dimensions of the head.
This high degree of accuracy is particularly important for outside broadcast productions. For example, when a very long lens is zoomed at 100:1, a mere fraction of a degree of tilt will appear to be a significant movement to the viewing audience.
Indeed, outside broadcast applications add significantly to the complexity of providing precise position information. While in the studio, cameras tend to be used around the horizontal, in outside broadcasts this may not be the case. The camera high above the football or rugby centre line will be pointing down all the time, so the head must be able to set its zero point at any angle.
Finally, the location of the camera may not be completely stable. The use of scaffold towers, for example, is common, and they often move during operation. Without inclinometers within the head to measure and compensate for this movement, the location data will be offset and the graphics out of place.
Putting Cameras on a Pedestal
There will also be occasions when cameras need to move around the studio floor, and so must be mounted on a pedestal. In such cases, the location of the pedestal’s mounting point must be included, in three-dimensional space. This information is added to the data from the lens and the head.
DIGITAL OPPORTUNITIES
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99