🌐 Unreal and Magic Leap, SanDisk SSDs Keep Crashing
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Welcome to another edition of VP Land.
In this issue:
🎯 ZEISS releases a new camera tracker
👓 Blending Unreal with AR
💾 SanDisk SSDs keep crashing
and more! Let’s dive in.
MAIN STAGE
ZEISS wastes no time putting Ncam acquisition to work
Talk about fast. It’s barely been 3 weeks since ZEISS announced the acquisition of Ncam, maker of camera tracking hardware, and they just dropped some new hardware.
At SIGGRAPH ZEISS announced CinCraft Scenario, a new camera tracking ecosystem.
Lots of tracking options
Compared to other real-time trackers, the CinCraft Scenario's unique selling point is its flexibility in where and how it can track.
Indoors / Outdoors
Green / Blue Screen
LED Volumes
It’s got three tracking options
Natural Feature Tracking: ZEISS says as long as there’s enough ‘detail,’ like brick walls or window frames, it can track the camera position using these natural features (not clear if this is real-time tracking or post-processing to get camera position data for VFX)
Reflective Markers: Track small, reflective markers on the floor using infrared. (Similar to how Mo-Sys tracks position, but unclear if you can calibrate a stage once and keep reusing the setup or if you have to calibrate every time)
Digital Markers: Hiding trackers in LED walls using frame remapping. Doesn’t specify if that’s restricted to a specific frame remapping solution, but this is a use case that was demoed by GhostFrame in our interview at NAB.
The hardware:
The tracking hardware is comprised of three pieces of gear (looks like the same Ncam hardware, just housed in a more rugged shell with ZEISS branding).
CamBar: Mounts to the camera to track objects or markers
Link: Mounted on camera, communicates with the Origin
Origin: Runs the Scenario software to track the camera’s position
And when it comes to calibrating the lens - the big advantage of being a lens company that buys a camera tracking manufacturer is plug-and-play integration.
No calibration is needed when you use any ZEISS lens (but you can also calibrate and use any non-ZEISS lens)
CinCraft Software
