The Dual Illusion of Virtual Production
Technology has reached the sweet spot when it becomes practical and affordable to use virtual studios and augmented reality live, in real time, for the AV market.
Much of what you see in films, on television and in commercials isn’t real, but it looks so convincing you don’t question its authenticity. In the past, visual effects involved specialist teams, months of painstaking processing and masses of computing power.
Today, photorealistic 3D visual effects can be generated in real time, on a standard PC, powered by the same graphics engine behind computer games like Fortnite. This is transformative for the enterprise AV market.
Just as film production companies use real-time photorealistic graphics with an LED wall, enterprises can now use the same technology to create a branded conference, a dealer training session, a product launch video or AGM reports, seamlessly switching between scenes in moments.
Covid 19 has accelerated the pace of change, bringing virtual environments to remote production, boosting creative and technical values even when participants can’t gather in the same location. We now have the need, and the technology, to create a dual illusion:
First, with today’s photorealistic 3D graphics, you can build any virtual location or scene, or even use a digital scan of a real location to create the look you need
Second, rather than have people travel to a studio or location, they can be digitally inserted in real time into the virtual environment, such that they appear to be in the studio or at an event location, interacting with a presenter who is in the studio while talking from home with just a simple kit to ‘beam’ them in.
The traditional view has been that virtual studios are expensive, require experts to design them, an integrator to engineer and deploy them, and specialist people to run them. That is where Mo-Sys comes in, with the unique StarTracker Studio, a complete virtual production system in a mobile rack.
Mo-Sys has long been a leader in virtual production technology for big budget movies, broadcast television, commercials and music videos. We recognised that there would be a moment when technology, creativity and price would all hit the sweet spot to bring it to the enterprise A/V market. Our vision was that this would be 2020, and we were prepared. What we had not predicted was that covid-19 would focus everyone’s attention.
Early in 2020 we took our expertise and experience from film and television and created the first complete virtual production studio system designed specifically for the corporate and enterprise market. We’ve taken care of everything: we’ve created a system that can do every kind of virtual production, using all screen technologies, simplified it, and reduced the equipment needed.
Now you have the power to create any photorealistic location or event, using remote designers and minimal studio staff. They have the same tools and technologies the film and broadcast companies have and can create the same illusions – and bring remote guests to the studio virtually. You can create your corporate look, as traditional or as creative as you want, while still navigating safely around covid restrictions.
