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The ruins of a bar come to life as
visitors wearing 3D glasses watch the waiter
pouring out spiced wine for customers. In a nearby
room, a beautiful woman reclines on a couch as she
is wooed by a handsome centurion. Meanwhile, two
women in Roman garb have a heated discussion as
they wander through a leafy arbour.
With
the prototype, images are supplied by a computer
carried in visitors’ rucksacks, but eventually
they could be sent from a tiny computational
device fitted to the headset.
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| Professor Nadia
Magnenat-Thalmann, coordinator of the LifePlus
project
(swissinfo) | |
How it works
MIRALab developed the life
simulation part of the software, taking advice
from historians on what sort of clothes the Romans
wore, how the material flowed, and how people
behaved.
Doctorate research projects were
set up to develop software for simulating the
hair, clothes, facial expressions and
speech.
Three dimensional images were
created using new algorithms, allowing computing
to be done in milliseconds. The idea was to make
the virtual life viewed through the 3D glasses
seem to happen in real time.
A key partner
in the project was Oxford-based 2D3, which sells
camera tracking software to film companies around
the world. Their product, Boujou, helps filmmakers
insert computer-generated material into real
footage.
3D
“In the film Troy, they wanted to
put in additional soldiers and ships on a beach,”
explained software engineer Andrew
Stoddart.
“So they went out and filmed an
empty beach from a helicopter. They now need to
know where to put that computer-generated
material.
“Our software loads in the images
they’ve shot and it will latch on to small
features in the image and track them through the
sequence. Then, using some advanced computer
vision algorithms, it reconstructs the three
dimensional points in the scene. The
computer-generated material can be added in
afterwards, located on top of those 3D
points.”
The problem is, it can take an
hour to track just a few seconds of footage, so
when 2D3 started the Pompeii project, they had to
increase the speed of the signal by a factor of
one thousand.
The Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology in Lausanne also played an important
role. “They found a way to make sure that the
calculation of the virtual world and the tracking
of the real world ran at the same time,”
Magnenat-Thalmann told swissinfo.
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What is absolutely new about this
technology is that it is
immediate. |
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Professor Nadia
Magnenat-Thalmann, Geneva University
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Augmented reality
Magnenat-Thalmann is proud of her
department’s achievements. “What is absolutely new
about this technology is that it is immediate,”
she said. “It is augmented reality, not
virtual.
“Many people are working on
virtual reality, but if they manage to achieve
immediate visibility, it is because they are only
focusing on buildings.”
Augmented reality
could have a future in the medical field, helping
surgeons to gain a three dimensional view of the
insides of patients. And Stoddart sees a bright
future for the technique in television.
“In
a studio interview situation, you could add in
little computer-generated objects on a table in
real time, as they do a live broadcast. That’s one
application, which is very close to realisation at
the moment.”
swissinfo, Julie Hunt at
Geneva
University |
