Virtual Studio Research Articles

間欠投射映像を用いた番組出演者への情報提示

We developed a new studio presentation system, that enables performers of the Virtual Studio to see imaginary objects within the studio, such as CG characters. In Virtual Studio productions, performers cannot directly see their CG interactive opponent. Therefore, performers must act while watching a composite image of themselves and the CG images, causing eye movements that are not synchronized with the CG images. This provides an unnatural impression to the viewer. To overcome this problem, we developed a system composed of an intermittently projected image that is shown only during the non-exposure time of the CCD camera, thus making it “invisible” to the camera. The projector can project imaginary objects, thereby enabling natural interactions between the performer and CG images. This system has been used in actual television programs, enabling performers with no previous experience with the Virtual Studio to perform naturally.

全方位照明による映像合成システム

The composite images in virtual studios as used by broadcast stations require that unnatural sensations be minimized real time characteristics be maintained. If the lighting conditions of captured images do not match those of computer graphics (CG), however, the composite image will appear unnatural to viewers. In response to this problem, we used projectors to reproduce the CG lighting environment in real space with the aim of reducing this unnatural feeling caused by unmatched lighting conditions. At the same time, chroma keying, the conventional video composite technique, does not allow for the setting of any lighting conditions on the real space side, thereby preventing the proposed light big reproduction technique from being applied to a virtual studio. For this reason, we developed a new video composite technique. The technique that uses transmission retro reflective material, an infrared camera placed at a conjugate position with respect to a color camera, and infrared lighting to remove the constraint conditions associated with the chroma key technique. In this paper, we formally propose this new technique and demonstrate its effectiveness.

A Participatory Virtual Studio for Environmental Planning

Public participation is a progress of “consensus building” about particular decision-making. Because of some intrinsic blemish, traditional public participation method always diminishes the range of public involvement. Rapidly growth of the Internet makes it one of the most massing accessed public media. Internet has an additional interactive mechanism rather than traditional public medias. Meanwhile Web GIS has developed into a mature Internet mapping and spatial analysis toolkit. Internet together with Web GIS launch a channel to get mass participation in a spatial referenced decision-making. This paper explores the use of Web GIS and other technologies to overcome the interactive information access barriers to secure a participatory process in the environmental planning. A Web GIS based Virtual Studio system is developed to demonstrate the concept.

International virtual design studio (ivds) program: overview, challenges, and students' perspectives

An international undergraduate design project is reviewed in this paper. The International Virtual Design Studio (IVDS) project is a joint project among Queen's University, Middle East Technical University, and Union College. The objective of IVDS is to provide a collaborative design experience to students in different international locations. This paper is an overview of the program and its challenges, as well as a collaboration of ideas and suggestions collected from the IVDS participants and IVDS Coordinators through surveys. This paper complements the previous publication on the IVDS program in which the focus was on the program from the IVDS Coordinators' point of view. These two paper should be beneficial for the organizers of current and future international student design projects.

実空間ベース仮想スタジオ〜実セットと仮想セットのシームレスな合成〜

When making a TV program in a studio, care must be taken that the camera does not shoot beyond the boundary of the studio set. In addition, limitations in cost and space for the set must be taken into account. In a virtual studio, on the other hand, we can solve this cost and space problem. But in turn, actors have to perform in front of a blue background screen, which is not an easy task. To solve these problems associated with real versus virtual studios, we have developed a new type of virtual studio called the Real Space-based Virtual Studio in which a real space image and a virtual one are combined naturally with no boundary seam. One major advantage in using this new virtual-real hybrid system is that the actors can concentrate on their roles. Another is that the camera work can be done without worrying about off-screen areas. In the present study, we constructed an omnidirectional image with ultra-high definition features and combined it with real studio image. We have developed an integration system and have shown that the omnidirectional and real studio images can be synthesized smoothly and naturally.

放送現業・コンテンツ制作 バーチャルスタジオシステムの一事例およびその運用

Asahi Broadcasting Corporation installed a virtual studio system last year. We developed operation software for controlling computer graphics events of TV programs, calibration software for quick and precise calibration, and data convert software for converting Maya data into Brainstorm data.

実写ベース仮想スタジオのための照明条件変更手法(マルチメディア記録応用, CGヴァーチャル技術および一般)

実写ベース仮想スタジオのための照明条件変更手法(マルチメディア記録応用, CGヴァーチャル技術および一般)

The Identity of Place in Virtual Design Studios

Since independence in 1991, Slovenian society has sought models for education in the West. As in Slovenia, schools of architecture situated in other countries of rapid social transformation are offered the opportunity to critically review examples of the virtual design studio (VDS). This article investigates such examples within the concepts of “identity” and “place.” These concepts are developed to include a consideration of the identity of virtual places and virtual studios and to examine the implications of globalization on architectural education. In conclusion, we develop an exploratory model for VDS as an instrument that integrates computer technology, distance learning, and design education.

Presenting information to support TV performers within the Virtual Studio

Presenting information to support TV performers within the Virtual Studio

The Prometheus Project — The Challenge of Disembodied and Dislocated Performances

The Prometheus project is seeking to create a virtual studio production chain. This paper discusses the technologies that are being investigated and in particular the research in progress within the Content and Coding Laboratory in BTexact Technologies. Also presented are the historical changes in the production of real and animated performances and how Prometheus and current trends can have an impact upon this. Two areas are identified where further study is required to ensure believability and coherence when virtual performances are created from reusable digital components.

Efficient optical camera tracking in virtual sets

Optical tracking systems have become particularly popular in virtual studios applications tending to substitute electromechanical ones. However, optical systems are reported to be inferior in terms of accuracy in camera motion estimation. Moreover, marker-based approaches often cause problems in image/video compositing and impose undesirable constraints on camera movement, present work introduces a novel methodology for the construction of a two-tone blue screen, which allows the localization of camera in three-dimensional (3-D) space on the basis of the captured sequence. At the same time, a novel algorithm is presented for the extraction of camera's 3-D motion parameters based on 3-D-to-two-dimensional (2-D) line correspondences. Simulated experiments have been included to illustrate the performance of the proposed system.

超高精細全天周画像を用いた実写ベース仮想スタジオ

To create a virtual studio that can generate highly realistic images in real time, we are developing technology that aims at creating a virtual studio based on image components from real pictures. The image components are divided to an environmental image component for long distant view and a three-dimensional image component for short distant view. We developed a principal-point alignment camera head for composing camera images into a high-resolution omnidirectional image as the environmental image component. We constructed an omnidirectional image (8000×8000 pixels) from about 1000 camera images and composed them into a complete view image seamlessly. We experimentally developed an HDTV image-based virtual studio with these image components and proved its usefulness for HDTV program production.

３次元映像情報メディア技術 照明の影響を含まない立体映像部品の取得法

A method is described for acquiring textures without highlights or shading for use in an image-based virtual studio for TV program production. In an image-based virtual studio a virtual set is made using video components, i.e. shapes and textures from real objects. If the textures of video components have highlights or shading due to lighting, the composite images are unnatural. The proposed method uses polarized light, rotary polarized filter in front of a camera, and information on light position to remove the highlights and shading from textures, thereby enabling images to be composed under any lighting condition. The effectiveness of the method was demonstrated experimentally.

Real-Time Camera Calibration for Virtual Studio

In this paper, we present an overall algorithm for real-time camera parameter extraction, which is one of the key elements in implementing virtual studio, and we also present a new method for calculating the lens distortion parameter in real time. In a virtual studio, the motion of a virtual camera generating a graphic studio must follow the motion of the real camera in order to generate a realistic video product. This requires the calculation of camera parameters in real-time by analyzing the positions of feature points in the input video. Towards this goal, we first design a special calibration pattern utilizing the concept of cross-ratio, which makes it easy to extract and identify feature points, so that we can calculate the camera parameters from the visible portion of the pattern in real-time. It is important to consider the lens distortion when zoom lenses are used because it causes nonnegligible errors in the computation of the camera parameters. However, the Tsai algorithm, adopted for camera calibration, calculates the lens distortion through nonlinear optimization in triple parameter space, which is inappropriate for our real-time system. Thus, we propose a new linear method by calculating the lens distortion parameter independently, which can be computed fast enough for our real-time application. We implement the whole algorithm using a Pentium PC and Matrox Genesis boards with five processing nodes in order to obtain the processing rate of 30 frames per second, which is the minimum requirement for TV broadcasting. Experimental results show this system can be used practically for realizing a virtual studio.

The pedagogy of virtual design studios

Virtual design studios (VDS) are proliferating as schools of architecture experiment with the technology of the Internet. Discussions about VDS typically focus on technological issues — which hardware, what software — or environments — MOOs, ftp. Recently, some papers have been written on the perceptual issues and the social aspects of remote design collaborations, thus contributing to some of the contextual issues within which virtual studios are conducted. This paper contributes another perspective, presenting a review of the pedagogical issues raised in a VDS. It examines the difficulties and opportunities that present themselves in teaching a VDS.

22-7 分散バーチャルスタジオによる次世代オンラインラーニング環境

22-7 分散バーチャルスタジオによる次世代オンラインラーニング環境

Meteorology meets computer graphics — a look at a wide range of weather visualisations for diverse audiences

Sophisticated scientific visualisation allows experts as well as lay persons to extract knowledge from complex data. This is particularly true for visualising the massive amounts of data involved in meteorological observations and simulations. These are of special interest to scientists, to forecasters, and to the general public. The paper presents and discusses a range of solutions for meteorological visualisation. Topics covered include systems for the production of TV weather forecasts, for the analysis of simulation output by experts, for weather information in the Web, and for meteorological visualisation using Virtual Studio, Augmented Reality and Augmented Video technology.

Scene Graph For Dynamic Virtual Environment: Spangraph

The VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) file format is a popular file format for describing a graphical scene: object shapes, appearance properties, animation, and interactions. However, the format does not provide any mechanism for describing the order of objects' appearances or their changes over time. Instead, an interface to Java is offered for controlling the temporal relationships between objects in the scene. The use of Java makes it difficult for a person with his programming skill to author a dynamic virtual environment. In this paper we attach a span and an age to each object and their hierarchical and temporal relations are expressed in a new data structure, called a span graph (SpanGraph). An object in the span graph, when alive, grows its age and performs associated actions according to its age during the extent of the time span. Furthermore, the object may have child objects whose spans are sub-extents of the parent span. In this paper, we demonstrate uses of the SpanGraph in virtual studio and virtual engineering design applications.

Augmented reality with automatic illumination control incorporating ellipsoidal models

In applications of augmented reality like virtual studio TV production, multisite video conference applications using a virtual meeting room and synthetic/natural hybrid coding according to the new ISO/MPEG-4 standard, a synthetic scene is mixed into a natural scene to generate a synthetic/natural hybrid image sequence. For realism, the illumination in both scenes should be identical. In this paper, the illumination of the natural scene is estimated automatically and applied to the synthetic scene. The natural scenes are restricted to scenes with nonoccluding, simple, moving, mainly rigid objects. For illumination estimation, these natural objects are automatically segmented in the natural image sequence and three-dimensionally (3-D) modeled using ellipsoid-like models. The 3-D shape, 3-D motion, and the displaced frame difference between two succeeding images are evaluated to estimate three illumination parameters. The parameters describe a distant point light source and ambient light. Using the estimated illumination parameters, the synthetic scene is rendered and mixed to the natural image sequence. Experimental results with a moving virtual object mixed into real video telephone sequences show that the virtual object appears naturally having the same shading and shadows as the real objects. Further, shading and shadow allows the viewer to understand the motion trajectory of the objects much better.

Broadcast Technology—Past, Present and Future: A Review

The broadcast technology is undergoing a phenomenal change in recent times. The advent of digital technology, with possibility of non-linear editing, virtual studios, disk-based storage, signal processing, multichannel transmission, multiple delivery systems, etc points to a very fascinating era. Research is also ongoing to devise a consumer receipt system which may be a lingua franca of education, entertainment, commerce, education, research and personal information. The “set-top” box shall dual as TV and a computer. This paper traces the broadcast development history and thereafter describes it's present status in India. The paper further discusses the new technology frontiers in the field of broadcasting with exciting possibilities of Direct to Home (DTH) service, Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting (ISDB) and broadcasting through Cyberspace.