Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry

Studio Virtuel Nouvelle Génération

Participants : Rémi Cozot [ contact ] , Fabrice Lamarche [ contact ] , Coralie Delahaye, Claudie Tertre.

This project is founded by the Britany council and involves two local companies (Artefacto, Bilboquet) and the Bunraku team of INRIA Rennes. It aims at creating a virtual studio for broadcast productions. It focuses on three main aspects which are (1) being able to create scenarios and interactively control interactions between virtual (characters for instance) and real (lights, presenter...) elements, (2) to enhance superimposing in order to achieve a visual unity between real and virtual elements and (3) to offer suitable graphic interfaces facilitating the conception / realization of such interactive production.

INRIA is involved in two aspects of the project. The first aspect deals with chroma key and calibration. During the shooting, actors are captured in front of a green screen. The aim of the chroma key technique is to remove this green screen in the background of the scene, and to replace it by another picture or video. In order to achieve visual unity between real and virtual images (colorimetry and luminosity), we apply characteristics of the real data to the virtual images (e.g. automatic white balance). The second aspect concerns scenario languages and behavior modeling. We are creating a new language dedicated to the description of interactive scenarios including interactions between virtual elements (virtual characters, virtual objects) and real elements (presenter for instance). The emphasis is placed on the usability and extensibility of the provided language while offering powerful paradigms dedicated to the description of active virtual elements and their potential capabilities.