Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 & H2020 Projects

Re@ct

• Type: FP7 COOPERATION

• Defi: IMMERSIVE PRODUCTION AND DELIVERY OF INTERACTIVE 3D CONTENT

• Instrument: Specific Targeted Research Project

• Objectif: Networked Media ans Search Systems

• Duration: December 2011 - November 2014 (Evaluation January through March 2015)

• Coordinator: BBC (UK)

• Partner: BBC (UK), Fraunhofer HHI (Germany), University of Surrey (UK), Artefacto (France), OMG (UK).

• Inria contact: Jean-Sébastien Franco, Edmond Boyer

• Abstract:RE@CT will introduce a new production methodology to create film-quality interactive characters from 3D video capture of actor performance. Recent advances in graphics hardware have produced interactive video games with photo-realistic scenes. However, interactive characters still lack the visual appeal and subtle details of real actor performance as captured on film. In addition, existing production pipelines for authoring animated characters are highly labour intensive. RE@CT aims to revolutionise the production of realistic characters and significantly reduce costs by developing an automated process to extract and represent animated characters from actor performance capture in a multiple camera studio. The key innovation is the development of methods for analysis and representation of 3D video to allow reuse for real-time interactive animation. This will enable efficient authoring of interactive characters with video quality appearance and motion. The project builds on the latest advances in 3D and free-viewpoint video from the contributing project partners. For interactive applications, the technical challenges are to achieve another step change in visual quality and to transform captured 3D video data into a representation that can be used to synthesise new actions and is compatible with current gaming technology.