Lifecast’s Volumetric Video Editor and the Future of Content Creation

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Welcome to VP Land - your daily update for all things virtual production & AI in video.

In this issue:

💬 Interview with Lifecast’s CEO Forrest Briggs, PH.D.
🌀 Build a camera spinner using IKEA products
🥽 What’s new with the VIVE XR headset

And more! Let’s dive in.

Exploring Lifecast’s Volumetric Video Editor

Lifecast creates volumetric video software to record footage using 180-degree cameras and turn it into 3D scenes for use in virtual production and mixed-reality experiences.

We spoke with Lifecast’s CEO, Forrest Briggs, Ph.D., about their new Volumetric Video Editor tool and what roles machine learning and AI will play in the future of content creation.

Below is an abridged version of our interview - you can read the full discussion here.

Can you give me the basic rundown of how the Volumetric Video Editor works and some use cases?

Volumetric video editor (VVE) is a professional tool for Mac and Windows that makes it possible to render, edit, preview, and encode volumetric video (or photos).

We are using cameras with dual 180-degree lenses, combined with machine learning, to construct a 3D model of each frame of video.

This approach enables capturing a complete, immersive volumetric scene with both foreground and background, in any environment.

The use cases include virtual production, virtual or mixed reality, games, and web development.

How does this integrate with Unreal and virtual production?

In virtual production, one of the challenges is creating convincing 3D environments to be rendered on an LED wall in Unreal Engine or Unity.

Lifecast's software can save time and money in this process, using photorealistic volumetric video captured with VR180 cameras in any environment.

Imagine you are filming a dialog with highly-paid actors in a remote location. Later, for some reason you need to re-film some of the shots. It would be expensive to bring the actors back on location, and maybe impossible to recreate the same weather conditions.

Why not capture the environment with a VR180 camera, just in case this situation arises?

Then Lifecast's software makes it possible to recreate those shots in a virtual production studio, at a significantly lower cost.

We are also building a library of royalty-free volumetric videos that are ready to use for virtual production.

What role do you see ML and AI playing in the future of content creation?

Immersive and/or volumetric media will gradually displace 2D photos and videos - machine learning will be a core component of all systems for capturing volumetric media.

AI-art generators such as Stable Diffusion will increasingly be important for content creation.

One of the interesting things we learned while making an immersive volumetric video is that when you give people the freedom to move the virtual camera, they will inevitably try to look somewhere the real cameras never captured, and they expect to see something plausible.

We are using AI to fill in these missing parts of volumetric scenes. There is a continuum of volumetric media, ranging from mostly real-world capture with missing parts filled in by AI to whole scenes completely imagined by AI, and everything in between.

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Olli Huttunen builds a 3D camera spinner using IKEA products (and some 3D printed parts)

Meta Quest Pro + iPhone = a hacked together Apple Vision Pro with front display

Read more about it and watch a video here.

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