Video with Depth

Lifewolf writes: "A new technology from 3DV Systems uses pulsed infrared illumination to capture depth information for every pixel of a video stream. This allows for neat tricks like realtime keying without need for color backgrounds. JVC is already selling a product based on this, the ZCAM."

Comments

This will revolutionize color keying.

[arsaspe]

Normally, when you want to key in a false background in a scene, you need to have a constant color in the background (Hence the use of blue and green screens). If the background isn't flat, then you either have to go at it with photoshop frame by frame, or use expensive border tracking software which is less than perfect. You could spend hours setting up a scene just right, with screens placed in all the right places, making sure that there is nothing else that is the same color as the key, and planning camera angles for an action sequence, not to mention the struggle of getting the keying to work just right.

with this new technology, however, you could film an actor just about anywhere with very little preperation, and key him/her out based on depth AND color (some situations may need both), and easily pop new things both in front and behind the actor. It could save movie studios a lot of time, effort, and money for doing special effects, especially after you consider how easily it would be to generate a virtual stunt double from the 3d mesh (film the actor from a few angles, and merge the resulting 3d wireframe. Voila, perfect model down to the wrinkles in the skin)

The downside:

[TheFlu]

"Once you capture live action footage in object video format, you can not only make it more visually engaging, but also sell advertising right in context of the live event."

Great, now you won't be able to distinguish between the show you're watching and the advertisement. Now when I'm watching TechTV, I can look forward to Britney Spears bouncing thru with a Pepsi at 30 second intervals.

Forger's wonder tool

[BlueUnderwear]

...admissable evidence that helps the court...

IMHO, this technology would rather do the contrary. It makes photo forgeries so damn easy: no afternoon-long sessions with the gimp to get exact contours of people to delete from or insert into picutres: just use the ZCAM's distance keying and you get instant masks. The example given was scary: a business meeting, from which they could edit out people at will. The ideal tool for anybody that wants to rewrite history. So, forget about photos staying admissible as evidence in court.

This is huge for MPEG4

[William Tanksley]

I don't believe nobody has posted about MPEG4. This is very interesting for that -- film using this, and you can encode into MPEG4 format with /huge/ compression almost automatically. The hard part about MPEG4 is object detection; this makes that almost free.

-Billy