SearchThe Landscape of 3D Experiences at Imagina 2012
 Imagina showed the innovative use of 3D technologies in applications from urban planning, construction, engineering, simulation to entertainment and education. Reproducing the world in 3D from increasingly real-time information was a major objective for almost everyone. The ideas discussed at Imagina set the scene and identifies the grand challenges for EXPERIMEDIA. The EXPERIMEDIA testbed concept and approach was presented by Michael Boniface. Using innovative teleimmersion techniques, EXPERIMEDIA experiments will explore how users in geographically distributed
sites will collaborate in real time in a shared simulated environment, as if
they were in the same physical location. Roberto Santoro, from Collaborative
Engineering, presented such a vision and how totally new types of experiences
can be created. Imagine skiing with friends and family on holiday in Schladming
Ski Resort from your home or running part of a competitive race with world
class athletes but from your local gym rather than on the track with them. Major research is necessary for real time 3D reconstruction of moving humans, activity recognition, data compression and transmission, rendering and visualization and the use of immersive environments. Geriad Briand, Technicolor, showed how things might work through a demonstration of REV-TV, a project developing a new class of TV game show that combines virtual reality content with traditional broadcast media. Mixed reality techniques are used to create avatars from motion and emotion recognition that are merged with real images on the fly for broadcast to the audience. The REV-TV concept was challenged during the discussion through a comparison between broadcast and massive online interactive applications. TV has a small participation with large viewers whereas massive online games have a large participation with a small number of viewers. Is the number of participants a technical issue, a social issue or a combination of both? There are technical limits in terms of scalability of processing larger numbers of interactions but the opportunity to participate in a game instantly and to be viewed by millions of people in the broadcast audience has huge potential and will provide an exciting new form of social experience. What's clear is that by combining Future Media Internet technologies with the Smart Venues at Schladming, CAR and FHW, there's huge potential for new forms of experience. The diversity of ecosystems available means that applications targeting entertainment, education, and high performance collaborative working can all be targeted. All that's needed is a little creativity to develop ways to link people to each other and in ways that of course capture the popular imagination. |