Volograms successfully completed its participation in IMAGINE-B5G Open Call 2, testing Volograms for Academia at the UPV's Immersive Lab over a the last year. The trials demonstrated the impact of immersive media and volumetric video in educational environments.

IMAGINE-B5G is a Horizon Europe / SNS JU initiative that provides an advanced end-to-end 5G/B5G platform enabling large-scale trials and pilots across Europe. The project federates experimental facilities in Norway, Spain, Portugal, and France, offering SMEs, start-ups, academia, and industry access to test innovative vertical applications and platform extensions. Volograms for Academia was one of the 15 projects selected in Open Call 2.

The project aimed to address the challenge of educational content creation and distribution in immersive environments. Volograms deployed their new product, Volograms Creator, which integrates the whole volumetric video creation and distribution pipeline using WebAR within the UPV facility, where we tested engagement of the content and easy of use of the platform.. The methodology included demonstrations, captures, and lecture demos.

The project results demonstrate the readiness of the technology for commercial deployment and strengthen Europe’s position in the B5G ecosystem.

Volograms plans to release Vologram Creator to all kinds of users withing the next year, with especial features for academics and students.

We’re proud to share that Volograms has been awarded the Grand Prize for Technological Innovation in 5G at the 2025 edition of the MEO Empresas 5G Challenge.

The final event, held in Lisbon on June 24, brought together 10 outstanding projects selected from over 40 international entries. Our  solution, Volograms Messages for Academia, which is part of the Imagine-B5G project, uses AI and computer vision to turn simple smartphone videos into realistic 3D holograms. Powered by the capabilities of 5G—especially its low latency, high bandwidth, and distributed computing—our platform allows people to create and share volumetric video messages that feel truly present, all from a mobile device.

This award validates years of research and development, and confirms the growing relevance of immersive technologies in how we communicate, teach, and share stories. For us, the promise of 5G isn’t just about faster connections—it’s about enabling new ways of being present, even at a distance.

“This solution has the potential to revolutionize communication by allowing someone to be ‘present’ through a 3D hologram. It’s a clear example of how 5G can power transformative, human-centered experiences.” Nuno Nunes — Chief Sales Officer at MEO Empresas

Our CEO and co-founder, Rafael Pagés, echoed that sentiment during the ceremony: “Winning the 5G Challenge is a tremendous honor. It validates our mission to make volumetric holograms part of everyday communication and proves that what once felt like science fiction is quickly becoming reality.”

‍Looking ahead, this recognition strengthens our commitment to expanding the reach of holographic content—starting with education, where students and teachers can benefit from more immersive, personal learning moments. But the potential extends far beyond, from remote collaboration and entertainment to live events and cultural preservation.

We’re also grateful to MEO Empresas for creating a platform that encourages bold ideas and meaningful innovation. Congratulations to all the other finalists as well, especially the teams behind Verbo and Amelia Survey, whose projects also stood out for their impact and originality.

This is just the beginning. With the power of 5G and a growing community of partners and creators, we’re more excited than ever to bring the holographic future to life.

Watch video →

As every year, we had the pleasure of attending SXSW in Austin, a hub of innovation where the brightest minds in tech, AI, and immersive experiences come together. This year was no exception—we connected with incredible companies pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in AI and immersive media.

One of the highlights was experiencing firsthand the latest advancements in immersive technologies. From groundbreaking AI-driven experiences to next-generation XR applications, SXSW provided a glimpse into the future of this space. I think this year had the best immersive exhibition I have seen so far, including very cool experiences such as Oto's Planet, Symphoni or Currents.

We were also thrilled to showcase our own work, including our contributions to the Volograms for Academia project within the Imagine-B5G initiative. Presenting at Ireland House, we demonstrated how streamable volumetric video can transform education and make immersive learning more accessible than ever.

Additionally, we had the honor of participating in a panel on spatial storytelling with our friends at Imvizar and Eirmersive, where we shared insights on the evolving landscape of digital narratives and how volumetric video is shaping the way stories are told.

SXSW never fails to inspire, and we’re excited to build on the connections and ideas sparked at this year’s event. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to push the boundaries of immersive technology!

Last December, we had the incredible opportunity to attend Stereopsia in Brussels as part of the Eirmersive delegation. Alongside amazing teams like Imvizar and TRANSMIXR, we showcased the innovative work we’re doing to introduce streamable volumetric video for educational purposes.

Our efforts are part of the Volograms for Academia project within the Imagine-B5G initiative, where we are pushing the boundaries of immersive learning experiences. Stereopsia provided the perfect platform to connect with industry leaders, share our advancements, and gather valuable feedback that will shape our future developments.

Looking ahead, we are excited to showcase more of our work at events throughout the year. Stay tuned for updates and follow us to see how we continue revolutionizing education with volumetric video!

Volograms for Academia is a project exploring the innovative application of volumetric video and WebAR to bring immersive educational content closer to a wider audience.

Utilising Volograms' AI-powered volumetric video technology and leveraging the high-speed capabilities of 5G networks, we aim to enable educators to create, share, and access immersive educational experiences with unprecedented ease and accessibility.

Volumetric video captures subjects in 3D, allowing for the creation of lifelike holograms that can be viewed from any angle. By integrating this technology with WebAR, we eliminate the need for specialised VR/AR headsets. Instead, students and educators can interact with volumetric holograms using everyday devices like smartphones and tablets. This approach democratises access to advanced educational tools, making high-quality, interactive learning experiences available to a broader audience.

The project will develop a streamlined platform where educators can easily produce their volumetric videos by uploading a video with their lecture. These volumetric videos will be hosted online, creating a rich repository of educational content that can be accessed on demand. Whether it's a detailed anatomical study, a historical re-enactment, or a complex scientific demonstration, educators can bring subjects to life in a way that is both engaging and pedagogically effective.

Project VM4Academia will advance the objectives of the IMAGINE-B5G project on multiple levels:

• Enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of the XR remote educational tool, transforming it into a more impactful human-to-human experience.
• Facilitating seamless interaction among users from diverse contexts, utilising the devices they already have, and avoiding the need of downloading for third party applications.
• Demonstrating the substantial impact of Vologram Messages, an accessible XR solution, in educational environments and vertically integrated with the IMAGINE-B5G facilities.

Ultimately, this project aims to transform educational methodologies, fostering a more immersive, interactive, and inclusive learning environment.

If you want to learn more about this and the other selected projects stay tuned to our website, IMAGINE-B5G website, and our social media channels.

Enjoy and share your Volograms with WebAR

Some exciting summer news to share with you!

This post was first shared with Volograms Newsletter subscribers, make sure you subscribe here if you want to be among the first to receive our updates.

At Volograms we believe that everyone should be able to capture and share their own volumetric holograms, that’s why we launched Volu, which quickly became one of the most used 3D AI solutions in the market. Since then we have been pushing to make your captures easier to share, distribute and enjoy by your friends, your family, your clients or any other audience. We believe that WebAR is fundamental for that: just tap on a link and you are good to go, no app required!

A couple of months ago, we launched Vologram Messages, a new product using the same AI technology powering Volu, but experienced directly on the Web thanks to a leading WebAR solution 8th Wall, and we are very excited to see its great reception among professionals who want to communicate more effectively with their audience. Let’s take this one step further!

Introducing Volograms Module for 8th Wall

If you are a developer and want to bring your Volograms to your own customised WebAR experiences you can now easily do it using our new 8th Wall Module. We even built a basic A-frame demo so you can get started faster. So now going from a video to a WebAR experience is easier than ever:

• Just record a single viewpoint video using your smartphone or camera.

• Our AI converts into a 3D volumetric hologram — a Vologram!

• Use our 8th Wall module to bring that Vologram to your WebAR project.

Wait, there is more!

With the module we are also introducing a new volumetric video format which integrates geometry and textures. You can see an example in the A-frame sample project. This new format works great for web experiences running on older devices, so your project should be supported in a wide variety of platforms. We are making this new format available for all our Pro users, and we will be releasing a converter tool for our old format soon.

Do you use other WebXR platforms?

Check out our open source Volograms library where you can find the tools needed to read our format and build your own integration tools. You can also check this example with a Threejs player to get started!

Do you need Vologram streaming?

We got you covered! If you are capturing long sequences and you want to avoid long loading times, you might want to try streaming the content. For this, Volograms has partnered with Arcturus to offer volumetric video adaptive streaming. This means that you can use Arcturus integrations in your project, including of course, their 8th Wall module.

And that’s it!

Ping us on Discord if you want to learn more. If you want to use Volograms on the web, but do not have the development skills, get in touch with us and we can help with your use-case.

> ⚠️ MARCH 2024 UPDATE Our 8th Wall sample project now lives here 👇 https://github.com/Volograms/volograms_8thwall_a-frame_example

We're thrilled to announce that we are now a platform partner on 8th Wall - a division of Niantic. 8th Wall is bridging the development gap between iOS and Android, so that anyone can experience the magic of AR—no matter what device they're on, all with no app required.

Bringing our technology to the 8th Wall platform helps us take another step towards our mission of bringing reality capture closer to everyone. 8th Wall’s technology is already powering Vologram Messages, our new webAR solution to use volograms for Marketing activation, Sales and Internal Communications and we are also working on integrations that will directly allow developers, agencies or brands to bring volograms they capture directly to 8th Wall. Stay tuned for more and learn more about some of our projects using 8th Wall here

https://www.linkedin.com/embed/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:7087113285283524609

3D humans from a photo: the data needed to train Volograms AI

A huge amount of high-quality human 3D models, and more!

This post was first shared with Volograms Newsletter subscribers, make sure you subscribe here if you want to be among the first to receive our updates.

You might wonder how Volu manages to create amazing 3D volumetric holograms using a single video captured with your smartphone. You might have seen some of our Vologram Messages and discovered they were created using a single video recorded on any digital camera. But how does this work?

Volograms AI platform is able to generate a 3D model of a person from a single photo using multiple neural networks: our pipeline includes semantic segmentation, photometric normal estimation, monocular volumetric reconstruction, back texture generation, and more! None of this would be possible without data to train these networks.

60,000+ 3D models, 1 million+ training images

Before working on our monocular 3D reconstruction tech, at Volograms, we started capturing people in 3D using our multi-camera volumetric capture technology. We captured people in our studio in Dublin, but also in other studios around the world that used our 3D reconstruction technology. This allowed to collect a huge dataset of high-quality 3D models with a wide variety of movements, different genders, body types, ethnicities and clothing items. More than 60,000 3D human models!

We render these high-quality 3D models from many different viewpoints, with different combinations of lighting and at different resolutions. Furthermore, we generate additional data to train different AI models in our pipeline: for example, we can obtain depth images to train our depth estimation algorithms; we obtain front and back image pairs to train our back texture image generator; or we can render normal maps to train a photometric normal estimator. We use more than 1 million training images!

Semantic labels

But my favourite feature is that these 3D models are semantically labelled. We categorise each vertex of the mesh within 20 different classes, so we can identify body parts, clothing items and more! More importantly, this is all done automatically. Check out this example with one of my 3D models 👇

There are plenty of additional uses for the labels, like defining different materials for each label, which are very useful for 3D creators. Furthermore these semantic labels have significantly improved the results, but we will talk about the progress improving the quality on another newsletter edition 😀.

What’s coming next?

Some of you mentioned you like these technical posts, so very soon we will tell you a bit more about how we are able to guess how humans look from the back, just by looking at them from the front. Our current system was designed in collaboration with Trinity College Dublin (you can read the paper here), but we are working on a new version based on diffusion networks, just like Stable Diffusion and other image-generation models. We are looking forward to showing you more stuff!

We saw the Apple Vision Pro in person

AWE, WWDC… What a month of events!

This post was first shared with Volograms Newsletter subscribers, make sure you subscribe here if you want to be among the first to receive our updates.

As you might know if you are following me or Volograms on Twitter, Apple invited us to WWDC, so I was among the first to see the Apple Vision Pro in person 😎. You could feel the excitement of the AR/VR community by listening to how the audience reacted to the introduction of the Apple Vision Pro. Like it or not, and even with the $3,500 price tag, this device will change the immersive industry, create new opportunities, businesses, and it will push competitors to catch up. It was amazing to live this in person at Apple Park 🤩.

Volograms & Vision Pro

Since the announcement, we have been regularly asked about how this changes things for Volograms, and there are two ways of answering this question. On the one hand this will affect us as a business: we believe this new device will bring a new wave of developers and creators that are interested in 3D technologies, with plenty of new ideas for apps, games and experiences which will work great with user-generated content created with Volograms AI technology. Humans have been at the centre of a lot of content we create and consume and they will still be important as 3D content becomes more popular. We are very excited about all these new creations!

On the other hand, from a technology point of view, and after watching the WWDC sessions and the release of the visionOS beta, Volograms will work great on the Vision Pro. Volograms are sequences of 3D meshes that are played as a volumetric video sequence, and they are compatible with WebXR, Unity, and we are exploring bringing them to USDZ (you can see an example here), so they are even easier to share and distribute.

Spatial Photos & Videos

One of the most interesting features of the Vision Pro is its ability to capture 3D photos and videos. Although there is little information about how this will work from a technical perspective, it looks like there is some stereoscopic recording done with the multiple cameras the device has. According to the reviews, the results were very impressive and they could be a great way of recording memories in the future that are fully native with these spatial computers that we will regularly wear.

And we couldn’t agree more.

This concept has always been a fundamental part of our vision. Everyone needs to be able to create 3D content that will be consumed in these devices, based on the real world, just as the content we normally create and consume on our smartphones. With Volograms technology, you can create this type of 3D photos and videos today, without the need of any special 3D camera. It even works on existing photos and videos, and even on AI-generated images.

You can start creating your own Vologram Messages today for free, and when the Vision Pro is launched, you will be able to see them there, in a fully native AR experience.

Vologram Messages: Connect. Engage. Amaze.

Don’t settle for the typical video. Try Vologram Messages today!

There are few innovations as captivating as volumetric holograms. Having a real person right in front of you, in full photo realistic 3D, feels like the best way to remotely communicate and connect with your audience. But capturing a person in full 3D is not an easy task: you typically need setups of cameras or depth sensors, a controlled environment such a studio, good lighting, and professionals taking care of the recording.

At Volograms, we have been working to simplify this process since we were founded, and a couple of years ago we released the very first way to generate volumetric holograms using only your smartphone, using Volograms AI technology, and our app, Volu.

But, how could we make this whole process even smoother? What if you didn’t need to download an app, and sharing your volumetric hologram with the world was as easy as opening a website?

Introducing Vologram Messages

Vologram Messages (VMs) is a new and exciting way to communicate with your audience, and you don’t even need to download an app! Vologram Messages breaks the barriers to entry to this technology and allows anyone to create their own personalised message and distribute it easily. This is how it works:

• You send us a video, recorded with your smartphone or any camera

• We turn it into a volumetric hologram using Volograms AI technology.

• We send you a link and a QR code with the experience, that you can share with your audience.

You can customise it with links and other interactive elements. You can monitor its performance with view count and clickthrough rate stats. You can choose the plan that works best for you audience. Use it for your next marketing campaing, to boost sales activations, or to drive effective internal communications. You can even use it for your very own VM-powered business card!

> “I really like the reactivity in launching the hologram in a very short time frame. The whole experience working with Volograms has been real smooth” Eric Chevallet, Head of Immersive Lab at Bearing Point

We have been testing Vologram Message with a wide variety of professionals and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. You can see some examples of VMs in the video above, which includes the one from Bearing Point’s Head of Immersive Lab, Eric Chevallet.

You can check out my own VM by scanning the QR code below, or by clicking on this link if you are on mobile.

Ready to experience the future of communication? Visit https://volograms.com/vologram-messages to learn more about Volograms Messages, and to get started with a free trial. And if you want to be updated with the latests Volograms releases and news, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter here. Be part of the next wave of immersive communications, we are looking forward to seeing what you create!

Volograms Meet Generative AI: Endless Creative Potential

Generative AI disrupted text, then images, now video, and 3D is next!

This post was first shared with Volograms Newsletter subscribers, make sure you subscribe here if you want to be among the first to receive our updates.

At Volograms we are working on creative tools that will power 3D user-generated content, specialising in getting the shape and appearance of real people in 3D in the most accessible and affordable way. This is because if you think of the media we typically consume on almost any platform (from apps such as Instagram and TikTok to content platforms like Youtube, to even pro media like TV and films!), it almost always features real people!

With Volograms technology you can easily transform a photo of a person into a 3D model. No need to ask the person to spin around, to wear specific clothes or anything like that: just one photo. In fact, if you record a full video of that same person while they are talking, performing, dancing… we can generate a volumetric video sequence, recorded from a single view-point. It even figures out how your back looks. It’s pretty great!

Text to 3D texture

We use a full volumetric capture pipeline for this, which includes multiple AI approaches, different neural networks, and many Computer Vision algorithms to bring the person “as is” from 2D to 3D. But, what if you could take this further? For example, could you use the popular text-to-image models to change the appearance of your 3D model through its textures?

To test it, we built a prototype based on Stable Diffusion that takes a text prompt as input, and generates the full texture of a 3D model generated with Volograms AI technology. The interesting part is that we can preserve the face of the subject (in fact, any of our semantic labels) and ask the generative model to start from there. Check out the examples below 👇

I’m pretty excited about the possibilities! Imagine using this to try different outfits, generate unlimited variations for game characters in a scalable way, and many more. There is still some work to do to make sure the quality of the resulting texture is high and consistent throughout the whole 3D model, so we will keep you updated with our progress.

Text to 3D human

You are probably wondering if our technology works with any image of a person. The answer is yes! Of course, there are limitations in terms of what is visible in the image, but there are many possibilities. For example, we have used our technology to turn photos of athletes that could be used in broadcast studios for Fox Sports and RTÉ (check it out here), and it worked with photos and videos the broadcasters already have. So, could we use a text-to-image model to generate a photo of a person, and then turn that person into a 3D model? Let’s give it a try!

I recently got invited to Adobe Firefly, so I headed there and typed:

I know, I’m not the best prompt engineer 😅. Then I took a couple of the results and put them through our 3D reconstruction pipeline, et voilá! A full 3D model that can easily be integrated into all kinds of 3D environments.

Including Augmented Reality, of course!

What do you think? You can now create 3D humans just by writing a text prompt! Be careful with your new superpower!

Lots more coming

We are working on even more generative AI features so make sure you follow us to get the latest updates! We want to follow a more open development process, so we are working on a few updates that will show how our technology works behind the scenes. We are looking forward to sharing them with you!

Volograms @ SXSW 2023

Experiencing the future of creative technologies in Austin

We are thrilled to see that in-person events are back to full power, and SXSW, the event in Austin that celebrates the convergence of tech, film, music, education, and culture, is not an exception!

Volu was announced at the online edition of SXSW back in 2021, and last year we introduced Volu Pro, showing hundreds of attendees how they could bring volumetric holograms to their experiences in an affordable and accessible way. SXSW is a special event for us!

!Photo by [Michele Raphael](assets/blog/Volograms---SXSW-2023-1.webp)

This year, we participated in a session about the technology used to build the Metaverse. I was accompanied in the session by VNTANA’s Ashley Crowder, Tiago Correia from Move.ai, and Barry McGeough from Wolverine Worldwide. We discussed about how AI is becoming the backbone of a new generation of content, and 3D is not exception; how brands are embracing 3D for e-commerce, and how the Metaverse term will soon be forgotten, just like we forgot the term Cyberspace. It was a great session, we had a full house!

One of the coolest feature we have been working on lately is an integration with 8th Wall’s WebAR technology, and I got to show in action at their developer meet and greet, at Niantic AR Garden. We have new products in the making that involve WebAR, so stay tuned!

We will be in Austin for a couple more days, so if you want to chat about how to bring volumetric holograms to your next project, get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to show you 🤩.

We're announcing a new and exciting partnership with BEATDAY. This immersive platform, famous for its virtual concerts, developed by Taipei-based technology giant HTC, is preparing a crazy 2023. One of the first milestones of the year will be the launch of a new app within the BEATDAY ecosystem: a special collaboration with Netflix's Light the Night... and Volu is already celebrating it!

The new version of our app not only features some cool content that teases the upcoming launch, it also includes a new export option exclusively for it. While we can't tell you what this will enable just yet, you can check out how cool volograms look in this futuristic world:

Watch video →

With these new features, our trailblazing collaboration with HTC already has led to Volu's first exclusive platform integration and to our first content collaboration. We can't wait to create together many more unique features for the users of our platforms to enjoy.

Watch video →

What is BEATDAY's new app about?

Light the Night: Redhat Killer combines "drama", "games" and "music" in the metaverse. The story will unfold in 2700 A.D., in the Linsen North Road District, the darkest in the cyberpunk world. This virtual experience will allow users to explore, create and play in a mind-blowing environment... Stay tuned!

Watch video →

Stay tuned and follow us on our socials, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedInor Facebook, to be the first to know when the BEATDAY x Light the Night app is out. And reach out if you'd like to learn more and explore exciting partnerships with us.

Our team members Nico and Valeria attended Ireland's National Awards ceremony yesterday in Dublin City Hall, where the company received the EmergeTech Startup Award, which is sponsored by McCann FitzGerald.

It is an honour to receive this award, and we would like to share it with the amazing Volograms team, and everyone supporting the company!

Using volograms for live sport broadcast

Create a 3D model using one single image using Volograms AI

Virtual production is making its way to the live TV broadcast studios: massive LED walls, interactive 3D graphics, and impressive visual effects… does it ring a bell? We are sure you have seen this in the broadcast of your favourite sport!

But if a Producer wants to integrate a real human on the stage, it ends up looking like a cardboard cut-out, and the camera operator needs to be very careful to avoid breaking the illusions. To make it more complicated: these images cannot be relight, cast shadows or interact with other elements.

Enter Volograms AI

A couple of months ago we got approached by an amazing consortium which included FOX Sports, RTÉ, Unity, HSLU, Trinity College Dublin and others, who were exploring the use of new technologies such as volumetric video in broadcast for the International Broadcasting Conventions (IBC). Could Volograms’ single-view 3D reconstruction be used to solve this issue?

Watch video →

And it works like a charm! These images, typically captured by the teams or the association running the competition (NFL, UEFA, GAA, etc.) and then distributed to the televisions, who have little control on the capture process. Volograms AI technology allows them obtain 3D models and even volumetric video sequences, without the need of bringing all the players to a volumetric capture studio. A great solution with a very promising market! Check the project website to learn more about the project and listen to Prof Aljosa Smolic and Zac Fields, Senior Vice President Graphic Technology & Integration at Fox Sports talk about our solution.

The user studies, led by Gareth Young, showed that viewers clearly preferred the 3D models, as they improved the realism and immersiveness of the scene. Check out some of the tests RTÉ and Fox Sports did in their studios 👇

This dramatic camera movement would not be possible with a 2D billboard. Also, check out the difference below of one of our models (left) with the traditional 2D billboards used today (right). The vologram not only reacts perfectly to the camera movement without tilting, it even casts realistic shadows!

And combining the models with camera tricks, lighting effects and other 3D elements in the scene can take the broadcasting experience to whole new level!

We are very excited about the future of this technology, as it is easily applicable to all kinds of sports, images, and videos. It also opens the possibility of using the models in Augmented Reality, enabling even fan engagement use cases 🤩.

What other uses cases do you have in mind?

If you want to integrate volograms into your virtual productions, get in touch with us and we will help you bring it life! You can start by capturing your own volumetric video using Volu here. We are looking forward to see what you create!

👉 And, to stay up-to-date in all things Volograms, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedInor Facebook.

If you want to dive deeper, watch the full presentation below:

Watch video →

500 Volograms Captured at LEARNTEC 2022

“Digital Mini Me” → “Augmented Reality Clone.” LEARNTEC 2022, Europe’s largest event for digital education, took place May 31-June 2. Rooom, a platform for creating, managing and sharing 3D, AR and VR experiences, built an impressive experience at LEARNTEC this year using our technology. Event attendees had a chance to meet their own digital Mini Me on a Holodeck through mobile captures taken on Volu. Around 500 attendees lined up to be cloned, which means 500 new volograms in the metaverse!

In the spirit of showcasing how, thanks to the combination of Volograms’ mobile volumetric capture technology and Rooom’s enterprise metaverse solutions, education and training professionals can bring themselves into augmented and virtual reality (AR & VR) to take e-learning to the next dimension, this installation enabled exactly that directly on the spot. The experience, created by the enterprise metaverse companyRooom, was as simple as taking a single photo with a smartphone using Volu. The 3D models were then automatically exported, transformed and integrated to Rooom’s AR platform and could be placed on the Holodeck using WebAR for the attendees to be able to stand next to their own digital clone. In the same way, educators can be present in a more immersive way for their audience, regardless of where they are all based. It was great to see how Volu was integrated into this event and the user-generated content created as a result of it.

Check out a few of the volograms captured below:

At Volograms, we are working on technologies to provide anyone with the opportunity to capture, play and share volograms in the metaverse; and with Volu, you can bring volumetric captures into your immersive or 3D product or projects! This creates endless opportunities for a variety of sectors, activities and use-cases. We are especially excited about how this may contribute to making education and training through digital more engaging and immersive thanks to the products and work of amazing partners like Rooom.

If you want to integrate Volu’s capabilities into your immersive project or your content platform, get in touch with us and we will help you bring it life! You can start by creating your own Mini Me, downloading Volu here. We are looking forward to see what you create!

And, to stay up-to-date in all things Volu and get inspiration for creation, follow us @GetVolu and @Volograms on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedInand Facebook.

It was a big week here last week at Volograms thanks to one of the top XR conferences, Augmented World Expo (AWE). If you weren’t following our socials this past week (which you should be - @getvolu and @volograms), here is everything you missed:

• We partnered with Arcturus and 8th Wall to create the AWE promo. This promo demonstrated immersive messaging by using a link that allowed anyone to project the vologram of AWE co-founder, Ori Inbar, in their space to invite them to AWE. Check it out here.
• We had a great time at AWE, where we had the opportunity to meet and hear directly from leaders in the XR community.
• Last, but most certainly not least… Volu won Best Use of AI at the Auggie Awards! If you haven't yet, download our (award winning😁) app, Volu, here.

We want to thank everyone who made last week possible and to all of our supporters! Congratulations to all of the other Auggie Awards winners.

AWE USA 2022 is taking place June 1-3. To promote this, Volograms partnered with Arcturus and 8th Wall to create an interactive experience where viewers can see AWE co-founder, Ori Inbar, placed in any space around them simply from a link on their smartphone or computer. Once clicking the link, viewers are shown their own environment around them through their devices camera and can tap the place they want Ori to appear. Once they place Ori, he delivers a special message inviting viewers to come to AWE USA 2022.

Instead of going to a multi-camera studio that only certain budgets can afford, Ori only required his smartphone device to capture himself from home. Captured on Volu and exported through Volu Pro, Ori's vologram was put into Arcturus' steaming servers and displayed on webAR using 8th Wall. Thanks to Arcturus and 8th Wall, this can be enjoyed directly by everyone by simply opening a link. This is a very exciting project showcasing one of the possible use-cases of Volu Pro and the potential for creation.

Check it out for yourself here.

Special shoutout to AWE, Arcturus and 8th Wall for making this project possible!

Download Volu now from the app store and join the Volu Pro waitlist.

Sharing volograms = immersive messaging + co-creation!

Volu’s brand-new feature that enables the sharing of volograms headlines the list of improvements in the app’s latest update, probably the most important to date!

Many of you use Volu to create masterpieces in AR that hundreds of thousands enjoy on social media and other platforms. So far, all this is created by “playing” volograms that you captured yourself — please note that “play” in our jargon means visualising a vologram in your own space (in AR), adding superpowers to it, and recording all sorts of crazy videos. Now imagine that you could also share the vologram itself with your friends! Wouldn’t possibilities be endless?

(dramatic pause)

Stop imagining! It’s up and running now! 🎉

How does it work?

Easy! With the latest version of Volu, you will find a new element on the top right corner of your vologram preview screen: the sharing icon. Once you tap on it, you will be able to see your list of friends and simply select the ones you want to share with. Once you do this, they will be able to see your vologram in their own list and “play” it as well! Please note: if at some point you change your mind, you can simply change the selection of friends that have access to that vologram.

Watch video →

You may be thinking: “Wait a minute! Friends on Volu?! That’s also new!” Yes! In order to implement a safe vologram sharing feature that you can fully control, we have made it possible to find, add, accept, reject, and cancel friends on Volu. The “Friends” screen can be accessed in two ways: when sharing a vologram, tapping on “Find more friends”, or through your account “Settings”. To add new friends, simply tap on “All” and search for their usernames. Once you add them, they will receive a notification that they can confirm or reject. Once the “friendship” is confirmed, you can start sharing volograms. If things go wrong, well, you can always remove friends from your list using the same menu, although we hope you don’t need to use this much 😅

Now that we know how it works… why are we so excited about it?

(dramatic pause 2)

Because this opens some amazing possibilities:

Amazing possibility 1: Immersive messaging

Seriously, we used smoke signals to message each other! We humans are all about saying things in all ways possible! Only in the last decades, we’ve gone from postcards to emails, instant messages, posts, PMs, GIFs, memes, stickers, voice notes… now imagine that you could send your vologram to deliver the message for you!

This opens doors for a whole new dimension of communications and we can’t wait to see what people decide to tell others this way. If you ask someone out or propose this way, please send us a vologram to let us know! If your mother sends you a “happy new day!” vologram… well, that’s what immersive mothers do!

Amazing possibility 2: Co-creation

But it’s not only passively hearing what the new vologram has to tell you… you can also co-create with it! With the vologram of your friend in your smartphone, you have a tireless and portable partner to have fun creating together anytime, anywhere.

Create with your friends who live 5 steps or 5000 km away from you. Include in your celebration videos the family members who live in a different country. Long distance relationship or travelling without your loved ones? Show them that you care by including them in your stories! If you created amazing things with your own volograms, we can’t wait to see what you will do bringing your friends and family (even those far away) into your own space!

Watch video →

Let’s start sharing

We can’t wait to hear your feedback regarding this new feature! Please let us know what you think, how you are enjoying it and how we can improve it in future releases. Also, add “getvolu” as your friend in the app to be among the first ones to receive new, trendy volograms.

Before you leave, we wanted to ask you a question: if you can “email”, “IM”, “PM”, even “whatsapp” a friend… how would you call it when you send them a vologram? We’ve already heard a few options and can’t decide! Please add your comments below if you have a good one 👇

Ah! And don’t forget to follow us: please give us a hand 👏 and subscribe to our Medium blog (the one you are reading) or follow us (Volograms) on social media: tw, li, ig, fb. Thanks for reading!

Sky News covered the Inspiring Women project that is aimed to inspire a new generation of Irish women to purse a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

The project, funded by research and innovation centre Learnovateand supported by Invictus Project EU used Volograms' technology to capture actors portraying Ellen Hutchins, Ireland's first female botanist, and physician Dorothy Stopford Price as they told their stories. The captures were then turned to volograms and viewed by students in Augmented Reality (AR) hoping to engage and inspire teenage audience more than traditional teaching materials.

We are proud to be able to support the project and bring such projects to life by making our technology accessible to everyone.

Watch video →

Volograms participated in SXSW, one of the most important events for media, art and technology, and a very important event for us, as we introduced Volu exactly one year ago in its 2021 edition. And, to continue with the tradition, we made a new announcement!

In a panel and workshop titled "The Holographic Reality of AR & Volumetric Video", alongside Russell Johnson and Elena Piechfrom AMP Creative, ‍and Eric Weymuellerfrom Zyntropics, our CEO Rafa Pagés announced the new step in our mission to bring volumetric capture to everyone: allowing pro-users to export their volograms and integrate them into their own creations.

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At the workshop, Rafa showed the potential of mobile volumetric capture, powered by Volu, and showed how simple it is to export them and integrate the captured models in other applications through Unity, Unreal, and even in WebAR. These features, currently in beta, are what we call Volu Pro and they will be evolving in the coming months with the feedback we receive from our testers. You can join the waitlistto get priority access to try the beta and follow the journey as we continue to improve it in the coming months.

Try volumetric capture in your next project, now it’s mobile, easy-to-use and free!

Bringing real humans into AR, VR, video games or any other 3D platform (Metaverse, anyone?) is a challenge for creators. The complexity, cost and lack of accessibility of established solutions have limited this creative resource to large projects and deep pockets. What if we could solve it with a smartphone, an app and a bunch of open-source tools?

We are so happy to tell you about something we have been working on during the last few months 😃.

Since we launched Volograms back in 2018, countless professionals have got in touch with the same frustration. They had learned about volumetric video and were fascinated by the possibility of bringing real people into their immersive experiences, but had realised the challenges of using this technology in practice. The need for complex studio setups, specialised staff, long timelines, and generous budgets was a crucial barrier for most creators and projects out there. At Volograms, we have addressed this barrier from the early days: reducing the number of cameras needed from 100+ to 10+, simplifying studio setups, streamlining the processing on the cloud, cutting the cost to a fraction of what it was… but we were still far from making it as accessible as most wanted it to be!

One year ago, we announced Volu at SXSW, the app that turned a single smartphone into a volumetric capture device, which was finally released to the App Store last September: From 100+ cameras, to 10+ to 1! From professional studios to capture-wherever-you-want! From days of processing to minutes! From tens of thousands, to thousands, to free!

“Can we use the volograms we capture in the app in other platforms?”

The first time we got this question was as early as Volu’s announcement event and it has never stopped since then! Professionals, prosumers and even hobbyists haven’t stopped requesting the expansion of Volu into an open creation tool. In an effort to guarantee a seamless end-to-end experience from the get-go, Volu was first released as a self-sufficient platform: volograms could be captured and enjoyed directly within the app. Our objective has always been ambitious: powering reality capture for the future of content, media and communications!

Just over a week ago, also at SXSW, we shared a sneak peek of Volu Pro: Volu’s expansion to become an omni-platform content creation tool. In short, Volu Pro adds to Volu’s core functionalities to support creators that are building the next generation of content. We are starting with the capacity to export volograms captured with the app and a set of tools that enable their integration into platforms such as Unity, Unreal, Blender, WebXR, social media lenses, and many more.

We are excited about the endless opportunities it unlocks! Some of the applications we are starting to see volograms being used in are:

• Activations and fan engagement campaigns using AR

• Fashion marketing campaigns

• Photorealistic rendering environments and virtual production

• Creation of realistic characters for video games

• 3D printing

And many other amazing use-cases we’ve seen studio-based volumetric video already in… We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

If you are interested in bringing real people into your work through mobile volumetric capture, please join our waitlist. We will soon share access to the export feature and to an initial set of tools. Lots of new exciting features will be released soon for Volu, as well as more tools to increase the interoperability and versatility of its exports. Stay tuned by following us on social media (tw, li, ig, fb) and subscribing to this blog (and please give us a clap 👏).

Thanks so much for reading!

The Volograms Team

Antony, in his blog wrote, "Think about what Volograms is doing: you just take out your phone, you frame a person for a while, and then you have a simplified volumetric video of that person that you can use wherever you want. And..... The purpose of these companies is to give people the tools to record a 3D version of a friend or of themselves so that it can then be inserted into a video or a virtual experience.

This is going to be huge: 3D elements will be for the metaverse what 2D elements are for the modern internet. Nowadays internet is all about photos (e.g. memes) and videos (e.g. TikTok). For our future 3D internet, we’ll need also 3D elements, 3D people, and tools to create them."

Tom, in his LinkedIn blog predicted, "Last year we saw the number of volumetric capture stages worldwide grow, new volumetric video solutions launch, such as livestream and real-time holograms from 8i, and applications, like Volu from Volograms, aim to democratize the creation of holograms to the masses using the smartphone camera.

I expect that 2022 will see continued growth in these areas with more capture stages appearing around the world, advancements in capture hardware which enabling more portable setup, new features around editing and playback, and a distinct focus on bringing volumetric video into the mainstream whether through studios or by making use of the smartphone camera and LiDAR sensors."

We are excited to keep working on our technology and drive the adoption of volumetric video and user-generated content for AR in 2022. Stay updated by following us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagramor joining our Discord server.

A few weeks ago, Digital Innovation Consultant Yulia Barnakova gave an amazing talk at TEDxLehighRiver. In her talk, Yulia explains how anyone can become tech savvy, by showing the audience how she went from "tech imposter" to "tech innovator". Yulia showed the vologram she created using Volu: "something that would typically cost you thousands of dollars in a studio can now be done with your phone".

You can find the full talk below, it's totally recommended!

Watch video →

We attended the Augmented World Expo… in person!

AWE gathered 3,000 XR professionals with a hybrid approach, physically happening in Santa Clara and virtually accessible from all over the world

Almost two years later, we attended an event in person! And that event was no other than AWE, the most important XR conference, which took place in the heart of Silicon Valley two weeks ago.

As Charlie Fink explains really well in Forbes, AWE is all about the people, the community. It was amazing to finally meet some of the people we virtually met during this last couple of years, and reconnecting with some of our friends and partners.

We realised that Volu had a really good reception within the community, so it was an amazing opportunity for us to hear feedback, learn about use cases and meet with partners that will be using our technology in crazy new ways. I also discovered that my silly dancing videos showing Volu’s reconstruction capabilities have a higher reach than I thought! 😅

Niantic, Snap and 8thWall were probably the stars of a show where the word “Metaverse” (a.k.a. the M word) was used as a double-edge sword: while we all acknowledge that it has exposed our field to the general media, our industry wants to make sure that the term remains open, inclusive and not associated with any single company in an unbalanced way. The three companies were all about the community and creators, and they nailed it.

John Hanke, Niantic’s CEO, told us more about the recently launched SDK for AR developers, and also Niantic Ventures, the company’s initiative to help the whole ecosystem thrive. It’s no secret that I’m a huge Niantic fan (and a level 39 Pokemon Go trainer 🤣), as they are building the tech stack needed by developers for the AR field to really thrive, with very smart strategies such as gamifying 3D scanning and involving users in building a digital twin of the world.

The amazing Lauren Goode from Wired moderated a panel with Bobby Murphy, Snap’s CTO, and Brielle Garcia, one of the most prolific AR creators. Snap is one of the most innovative companies in the space (they joked about how Snap’s features get copied all the time), and their creative tools are among the most powerful and easiest to use.

And Tom Emrich, 8thWall’s VP of Product, introduced Reality Engine, the company’s WebAR solution that allows creators to build one single experience and deploy in almost any XR device: from headsets to mobile phones. Pretty amazing!

We also got the chance to see the latest devices in person! Pico, Varjo, CREAL, Meta Materials, Lenovo, HTC, and many others showed their solutions. I was especially amazed by the Tilt Five AR gaming tabletop: lighter, wider field of view and clearer images than expected! Now I really want to buy one!

We lost the Best Consumer App Auggie to Google Maps…

And no, we didn’t win the Auggie Award. I have to say that losing to Google Maps in the Best Consumer App category was a bit disappointing… There wasn’t even anyone from the Google Maps team to pick up the award 😓. But anyway, we are grateful to all of you who voted for us and pushed us to the top 5! Thanks a lot!

I also want to thank our friends at Arcturus, Anything World, BITKRAFT, OpenBCI, Luma Labs, 4Dviews, Avatar Dimension, and many others for the lunches, dinners, beers, coffees and all the fun we had together. Looking forward to seeing you again!

Lastly, shoutout to the AWE team for minimising the COVID-transmission risks at the event. With cases in the rise in many geographies, we appreciated the vaccination checks, the hygienic measures taken around the conference centre, and all the information received. It’s great to be back to in-person events, but only if we can manage to keep them safe!

Last month we had the CNN in our office learning about Volograms, our technology, and our vision of the future. We got the chance to show them how we are enabling user-generated 3D content using just a smartphone and Volu. You can read the full feature here, which includes an amazing video!

And that was only the beginning! We also got featured as startup of the week on Silicon Republic, the most important medium for technology, science and startup news in Ireland, with influence all over the world. As an Irish company, we are thrilled about this feature!

Furthermore, we were featured on the Spanish TV news at TVE in a piece about the Metaverse, together with our friends of Virtual Voyagers. Volumetric video is the best way to bring real humans to the Metaverse, and with Volu, anyone can now capture amazing 3D humans.

The global echoes that this month triggered don't stop there: we got coverage from outlets in France, Russia, and Thailand, to name a few. Even the influential publication The Drum hand-picked Volograms as one of the great examples of how people are bringing themselves into digital media!

Artificial intelligence (AI) and volumetric video innovator, Volograms, today debuted the public version of its 3D content creation app, Volu. Using advanced deep learning and computer vision technologies, its AI-powered mobile content creation platform is the first to allow smartphone users to easily create, share and play with immersive, dynamic content for AR/VR (augmented reality/ virtual reality) from one quick mobile video. Download Volu for the full experience.

“Technology advances are creating new forms of content and changing how we communicate. Innovators like Volograms will help pave the way for all smartphone users to embrace the next era of AR/VR experiences by simplifying user-generated content creation,” noted Thomas Alt, founder of Metaio, an AR company acquired by Apple, where he then served as director of engineering and director of strategic deals, before taking on his current role as venture partner at Atlantic Bridge. “Being able to create AR-ready content with a smartphone from a single video perspective in a way that isn’t ridiculously complicated or limited to an inanimate object is groundbreaking.”

Volu is an extension of Volograms’ mission to make AR/VR content creation more accessible. Despite AR users topping 90 million in 2021 in the United States alone and 2.4 billion mobile AR users estimated worldwide by 2023, content creation tools for AR/VR have been too inaccessible, expensive, complicated or rudimentary to earn mass appeal to date. iPhone users can now use Volu to create their own content and share with family, friends and their extended social networks.

“Augmented and virtual reality will change our communication patterns and our everyday lives, similar to the advent of the internet, social media and smartphones. Eventually, it will be ubiquitous,” said Rafael Pagés, CEO and co-founder, Volograms. “However, just like every other technology leap, first it needs to become more accessible. Putting the power of dynamic 3D content creation into every hand, pocket or purse carrying a smartphone with our Volu app is the first step. We are enabling user-generated content for AR by turning standard smartphone cameras into AR-ready cameras.”

Volograms got its start helping professional content creators achieve the same high-end, full-body video reconstructions as the more than 100 professional sensors previously needed with only a dozen consumer-grade cameras. Now, with the public launch of its first mobile app, Volograms is further broadening the reach of volumetric video as it allows users to create fun, immersive content from a single smartphone video.

Based on feedback from thousands of Volu beta users around the globe, Volograms fine-tuned key capabilities within the new version of the app before general release – including enhancing reliability, speeding 3D reconstruction, incorporating a self-capture timer, and adding new creative effects and algorithms to improve the quality of critical details such as facial features. In addition, the team is working to add a more advanced sharing functionality for easier co-creation and access for Android devices imminently. View a wide range of examples from the Volograms team and Volu beta users here.

Understanding the Technology Behind Volu

Leveraging years of experience improving volumetric video content creation and its extensive content database to feed its AI algorithms for computer vision and 3D reconstruction, Volograms’ proprietary technology enables Volu to deliver the capabilities that make AR-ready mobile capture accessible for the masses. Key technical components include:

• Single-view volumetric capture, which allows for 3D reconstruction from a single, mobile camera viewpoint
• Automatic foreground segmentation, which eliminates the need for a green screen and allows app usage in uncontrolled environments – even outdoors
• Markerless motion capture, which powers 3D-skeleton estimation to properly capture human movement without any additional equipment or sensors
• Compatibility with advanced sensors, including LiDAR, to generate more accurate results
• Comprehensive cloud computing processing and keyframe-based sequence encoding and compression
• Future-ready integration with machine learning tools to make processing mobile and eventually allow the move to real-time streaming with 5G

Download Volu on the Apple App Store for the full experience.

‍‍

Images and videos

Please find more images and videos in our Press Kit.

Find Volu

https://www.getvolu.com

https://www.instagram.com/getvolu

https://www.tiktok.com/@getvolu

https://twitter.com/getvolu

Find Volograms

https://www.volograms.com

https://twitter.com/volograms

https://www.linkedin.com/company/volograms

https://www.instagram.com/volograms/

https://medium.com/volograms

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYIKN9jJaa-L-IdxVGb29Lw

https://www.facebook.com/vologram

Volu, AR content creation for **everyone**

You can download Volu from the App Store today

Today, is the day.

Volu is finally available to download from the App Store. From today, you can capture your own volograms using only your iPhone and no additional equipment. And you can start here 👉 Volu by Volograms on the App Store.

This is a huge milestone for Volograms, not only because our amazing team has dedicated a huge effort to make Volu a reality, but also because its the realisation of our mission: bringing volumetric video capture closer to everyone. We believe that user-generated content is going to be key for the success of the whole Augmented Reality ecosystem, and Volu is the first app that allows anyone to capture people in AR. And we are looking forward to seeing what you create!

**How to capture your own volograms**

But let’s get to it: how does it work? Very easy! To capture a vologram you just need to tap on the + button in the Creator screen and record a person as if you were recording a normal video. After that, Volu takes care of the rest: it transforms your standard video into a volumetric video, which you can then play with in AR. Check out this very short tutorial 👇

Watch video →

Volu uses AI to estimate a 3D model for every frame of the video, textures them using a combination of what the camera sees and what the neural network has estimated, and compresses them so they are temporally coherent and don’t use too much space of your phone’s storage.

Volu is even able to estimate the 3D shape and texture of a person even in areas that the camera doesn’t see, such as the back or the back of the neck. We are able to achieve this thanks to our deep learning algorithms, which have been trained with thousands of high-quality 3D human models captured our professional volumetric capture studios.

AR content creation like never before

Once your vologram has been processed, hit Play and start playing with it in AR. You can place your vologram on any surface, rotate it, make it super tall, or teeny tiny, it’s up to you! Furthermore, Volu features another very cool creative tool: superpowers! These full-body AR filters supercharge your creations 😎 .

Volu has been in public beta for a couple of months and our amazing testers have captured thousands of volograms. Our users have used Volu for marketing purposes (for example, using a mini-me to introduce a product), for dancing videos (all kinds of dances, even breakdance!), work-out videos (my favourite is one doing step aerobics over a cucumber 🤣), fashion (even professionally!), AR memories of their loved ones, getting to know people, AR memes, bringing people closer (taking them virtually to places or events they can’t go with the current restrictions), and for cool videos for social media (featuring their doubles as giants or gnomes!). You can check some of these creations in Volu’s social media accounts. Volu powers this new generation of user-generated content for AR, and this is only the beginning!

What’s coming next

We are just getting started! In the coming months we have a bunch of cool features coming up, including ARKit’s people occlusions for more realistic and immersive creations, more tutorials and tricks within the app, a way to add friends to share your volograms with, a way to export your volograms to other platforms and, of course, an Android version!

So, if you have a feature request, feedback or want to share your creations with our community, you are invited to join our Discord server. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Lastly, remember to tag us on social media with #volograms or #getvolu (or directly mention us @volograms or @getvolu), we regularly share of our users creations. We are looking forward to seeing what you create! 😃

User-generated content (UGC) for Augmented Reality (AR) — Social media

We talk about powering UGC for AR. However, these words may sound too abstract for most people out there. This article explains their meaning in plain English and dives deeper into the first example of how we are putting this in practice: social media.

Note: if you are not yet familiar with augmented reality, you can check this plain-English definition, Wikipedia’s comprehensive introduction or this short video by Mashable (from 2015, but still works).

Content for augmented reality

Before we dive into “user-generated content for AR” in particular, let’s first discuss what we mean with “content for AR” in general. Uniquely, AR involves two fundamental content components:

• The reality that you are experiencing.

• The digital content that you are bringing into it to augment it.

As a user of AR, I can freely decide about my reality (the real environment where I play the digital content). For instance, I can take a selfie with puppy ears at home or in a cool restaurant, or I can play my AR pokémon on my hand or at a beautiful outdoors spot.

However, for the digital content, most users (except for AR creators/developers) are limited set of pre-defined options. For example, you may have another AR filter that adds glasses instead of puppy ears, but if you wanted kangaroo ears and no-one has created a filter for that, you can’t do it without specialised tools and training.

If you think about it, this is the same limitation video/film content had some decades back. Yes, people could watch a variety of films and video pieces in theatres and TV (equivalent to the AR content pushed by brands and big tech companies today). Also, independent professionals could film a clip with more humble equipment, and some lucky people had their own video cameras (equivalent to current professional and prosumer AR creators/developers). But normal users were not able to shoot their own video back then. Today, in contrast, thanks to smartphone cameras, a normal user can record their own video — that’s how platforms like YouTube and TikTok have become so incredibly popular. In other words, users’ ability to create their own content has opened video platforms to user-generated content (UGC).

Is there an equivalent to a smartphone camera for AR that enables all users to create/capture the digital content for it? In other words, is there UGC for AR platforms?

Where are we today?

Tools to generate content for AR have evolved massively in the last few years. Different solutions have emerged for different platforms. To get us started, in this article, we will focus on Social media AR.

With over 200 million users engaging with AR content every day on Snapchat and at least 600 million doing the same every month on Facebook and Instagram, social media seems to be the most widely adopted type of AR by far. These content creation and sharing apps use AR to provide their camera with many new creative functionalities, known as AR lenses or AR effects. These were very simple in origin (like puppy ears and lipstick colours) and could only be applied to faces and flat surfaces. Today, the AR engines of these platforms can identify the full human body and fairly complex spaces, even use machine learning to add amazing AR elements on top of all that. Also, they have introduced more degrees of AR interactivity between what the camera is seeing and the digital elements, enabling more complex use-cases, like shopping and gaming. For example, you can digitally place on your real table a lamp you are thinking of buying so that it automatically scales to the size it would actually have. Or you can play with a digital character that runs away from you and hides behind real objects. With such creative possibilities, big tech companies, like Snap Inc. and Facebook, would be limiting the growth of their platforms if they centralised all the AR content creation themselves. Instead, their platforms are open to the global community of studios and creators to join in.

!Social media AR lenses by independent studios and creators, [ANRK and Brielle Garcia](assets/blog/User-generated-content--UGC--for-Augmented-Reality--AR----Social-media-2.webp)

In order to empower this community and make the creation of content more dynamic, social media companies have created amazing tools for AR content creation. Two of the best-known examples are Lens Studio (by Snap) and Spark (by Facebook). These are tools that can be used by professionals and prosumers to create their own AR lenses/effects — in fact, hundreds of thousands of creators around the world already use these tools. They require a bit of training to get started, an accesible setup (a computer to run them) and enable a high-level of complexity for the most advanced creators.

The question for us: can we go one step further? Can there be tools that complement the existing ones and empower the hundreds of millions of social media AR users to become AR content creators? Can there be something as straightforward as a smartphone camera app to create content for AR?

UGC for AR

That’s where Volu and its underlying technology come in: they enable the capture of real people (with their own unique aspects and movements) into AR content, simply using your smartphone.

This is a specially interesting approach to AR user-generated content for a few reasons. First, it’s human content: a quick look at the most popular platforms shows that human content is key. How many pictures or videos include real people in them vs other types of content? Bringing our real selves into our content is our favourite way of expression, and that’s what these tools are enabling. Second, it’s full 3D: it’s only proper AR if the content can integrate with the real environment. Even simple lenses with puppy ears are 3D for a good reason, flat content doesn’t look great in our real (3D) spaces. Third, it’s mobile: most users create content where and when they can and want. Asking them to pre-create content in a computer to then share on mobile sets a critical point of friction to unlock UGC at scale.

Watch video →

Are we there yet?

While Volu has the potential to unlock UGC for AR, users can only enjoy their AR content in the app itself for now. To realise our vision, we are working to integrate with the best AR platforms so users’ content can be shared and enjoyed wherever they want. These are the remaining few steps to make this come true for social media AR:

• File size: currently, a 5-second vologram (a piece of AR content representing a real person) may require around 30MB. AR lenses/effects are limited to a fraction of that. Different techniques will enable the reconciliation of these two. For example, as part of cutting-edge initiative inspired by Ignite, our friends at Repronauts found a way to massively reduce the size of a vologram thanks to their 3D post-processing pipeline. For now, as the process is not yet fully automated, we are doing so only for brands who want to bring their key people into AR content. However, this already proves that we are very close to overcoming the file size limitations.

• Format: volumetric video (the format of Volu’s captures) is very new. As a sequence of static 3D models (in the same way a video is a sequence of pictures), you need a software component, called player, for it to be displayed (as there are specific “video players”). The limitation is that social media apps do not include such a player yet. So far, our work mostly involves the manual play of one 3D model after the other — not efficient, but it works. Using this technique, our friends at Makerlounge posted back in May 2019 the first Instagram effect with a real person moving in it. Technically, it was a very low-resolution version of one of our volograms playing 3D-model after 3D-model in a loop, but with their creativity and tech skills, it looked great!

• Direct integration: while AR content can be created with a smartphone thanks to Volu, as of today, it still needs to be exported and manually imported into a lens/effect. Today, amazing creators like Studio ANRK are pioneering the integration of longer sequences of volumetric video (e.g., the small-size ones by Repronauts) into amazing lenses using Lens Studio. Artists/creators of their level will always be at the forefront, creating professional pieces for the most demanding clients. For more casual everyday content, we can’t wait to integrate our technology directly with social media platforms, so that any user can create their own AR lens directly with their smartphone!

Watch video →

I want to know more!

If you want to see the creativity that AR user-generated content is enabling, follow @getvolu on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Also, if you want to be the first to know about our progress powering this content revolution and the integration of Volu with AR platforms, including social media, you can subscribe to our Medium blog (the one you are reading) or follow us (Volograms) on social media: tw, li, ig, fb. Thanks for reading!

Volu is now in public beta, but how did we get there?— Volograms’ building-in-public series

1st - Friends & family. 2nd - Private beta. 3rd - You!

It’s only been a few months since we came out of stealth mode and announced Volu, the first app that allows users to capture people in AR. This week, we are opening our beta to any iOS user.

We believe Volu will unlock user-generated content for AR, but for that we need to nail the user experience: how do you integrate 3D capture and AR content playback without getting everyone confused? How do you flow from 2D video to AR with a seamless experience? We, of course, had some ideas (some of us are very opinionated 😅), but we needed to test them as much as we could before making Volu available for everyone. So today I want to tell you a bit more about our beta testing journey and some of the things we needed to do before opening Volu testing to everyone.

Friends & family, our first beta heroes

The purpose of our first beta was validating that the main flow of the app worked and made sense: capture a vologram, play with it in AR and share the content you create. As simple as that.

We did the onboarding of every new user, and offered them personal support in the process; we needed to understand what was obvious and what wasn’t. It was the first time our 3D reconstruction pipeline was tested with people outside of Volograms, and it didn’t take long for the first issues to show up. For example, testers who were familiar with 3D scanning, moved around the subject while capturing, producing very strange and even psychedelic results; testers who were not familiar with volumetric video tried capturing objects such as chairs, stuffed toys, or sometimes their pets… we were not expecting that! All these attempts caused the system to crash, as one of the first steps of the system is detecting the person in the scene: we had to make the system more robust, and also improve our communication skills 🤣.

Volu’s first beta only allowed vologram capture with LiDAR-enabled iOS devices, however, the rest of the app worked on any ARKit-enabled iOS devices (anything newer than the iPhone 6S), so we made sure there were some cool models our first testers could play with — even if they couldn’t capture their own volograms, they would be able to play with superpowers (cool special effects that can be added to a vologram) and find some bugs.

And, after a few weeks of intense testing, we decided to get out of our confort zone and let more people in.

Volu’s closed beta, learning from our testers

We started inviting some of the people on our waitlist around mid-April, and continued doing so until this week. Along these three months we progressively invited around 1000 testers, and we learned so much from them! If you are building your own app, I totally recommend going through a process like this.

During these months we got the app and back-end ready for self-onboarding, we integrated a ticketing system for support, fixed many bugs and tweaked the UI so the user experience was significantly better. We also added some curated content to help testers get the most out of the app, integrated some tooltips, and extended the capture capabilities to support iPhone XR or any other newer iOS device. Lastly, we continued improving the reconstruction system to make it more robust (I will write another post eventually about how our human segmentation algorithm was chopping off hands and sometimes even heads, and how we fixed it 🤓), and improved our communications so testers know what they can capture with the app (although we still get a chair or a cat every now and then 😆).

But the most important part of this beta was understanding how our testers were using the app, and thanks to that, we prioritised features that were initially planned for later in the year. For example, some testers were home alone or self-isolating during the pandemic so they didn’t have anyone to capture them, so we built a simple timer that helped them capture themselves.

All this communication was mainly through our Discord server, where more than 700 enthusiasts have been sharing some of their creations, and some of them have been very active: check out Russ Johnson, Gabriele Romagnoli, Patricia Russ or Carlos Duque! If you are one of our testers: thanks so much! We wouldn’t have made it without your help!

What’s next 👉 test Volu today!

This week we made Volu’s iOS beta public, and you have the download link on our website: https://getvolu.com. You will need to download Apple’s TestFlight app first.

During the next few months we will add new cool functionalities, including some our testers have been asking for, we will launch the next version of our 3D reconstruction pipeline with more detailed models and fewer artifacts, and we will get the app ready to be released, also for Android!

In the meantime, if you are interested, go ahead and give Volu a try! We would love to get your feedback and build something that is cool and useful.

But remember it’s still in beta, so if you try to break it… you will! But have fun in the process! 😃

User-Generated Content is the Holy Grail of Augmented Reality

While content creation is only available to designers, artists and other professionals, AR will not go mainstream.

If you analyse when each media platform reached massive success, you will find a common denominator: user-generated content. When users have the power to create content, adoption grows exponentially. When this happens, platforms become mainstream and impactful and have the potential to change the way we communicate.

Experts and all big-tech companies agree Augmented Reality is the next relevant platform… but is there an easy way its users can create their own content?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

Creating content for AR is still fairly complicated. Given the 3D nature of the real world, AR content also needs to be 3D, so it goes without saying the content creation tools should run on 3D environments too. Unity and Unreal took a brave step and became the default platforms for professionals and prosumers to create content for AR, convincing thousands of game developers to give this new medium a try. Snap and Facebook, through their AR lenses and AR effects respectively, popularised a way to enjoy AR content directly on their users’ faces, and seeing their massive potential, they created tools to simplify the creation and publication of these filters, through desktop software that can be learned easily. But… is this enough to satisfy all the content demand for AR?

Again, the answer is no.

First, because you still need to download their desktop software, learn using their tutorials, and only then get creative. Second, because one of the main limitations these tools have is that most of the content in AR is synthetic, especially the only content available users can create, personalised avatars, which even though they are fun and playful, are almost always cartoonish. It’s like if you turned on Netflix and you could only watch animated movies.

Volu, the first app that allows users to capture people in AR

Volograms mission is bringing reality capture closer to everyone and this week we announced a new product we had in the making: Volu. Volu is a new app that allows you to capture people in 3D, play with the models with 3D special effects we call “superpowers,” and create content directly in AR.

With Volu, you can capture a friend as if you were recording a normal video. The captured footage is processed using our deep learning algorithms and you can experience the resulting vologram** directly in AR, create new content with it and share it on your preferred social network. Furthermore, you can play with the built-in superpowers and create amazing content you can’t create with any other app. Volu unlocks user-generated content for AR, content based on the real world, content that is human.

Watch video →

Volu is the result of more than a year of hard work at Volograms, where after three years creating volumetric video content for professionals, we decided to go back to where we started, and build something that works on the phone, and which enables AR content creation to virtually everyone. Volu is the first app that allows you to capture volumetric video content with a single smartphone. No need to go to a massive studio with dozens of cameras.

Volu will be available to beta-test in the coming weeks and we are looking for creators to be our firsts testers. If you are interested, join our waitlist!

Stay tuned for more! 😎

Volograms has a new visual identity, this is why we decided to change it

**TL;DR**: new year, new goals, new logo!

Today, we are refreshing our logo and our whole visual identity with a vibrant, creative and modern look. We have been brewing this change for a few months and we couldn’t be happier with the result. Nevertheless, it was hard for us to say goodbye to our original logo, which has been with us since even before launching the company. And it was especially difficult for me… because I designed it 😅. Let me tell you a bit more!

When Jan, Kostas and I decided to spin out of TCD, we needed to come up with a name for the company and, of course, a logo. None of us had any artistic background, however, I was always passionate about design and I knew how to use Photoshop (I learned during my college days when I was doing photomontages for the satire magazine, El Eco de Teleco), so I decided to give it a try and come up with something we could use temporarily. Conscious of how important having a consistent branding was, I spent some time designing not only our would-be logo, but also deciding typography, colours, and other visual guidelines that we could use.

I wanted something simple that embraced flat design and gradients. I went for the triangle because it’s the primitive shape of 3D computer graphics, it could replace the V in Volograms and putting it inside a circle made it look like a rotated “play” button.

And although there was some initial pushback about its simplicity, we ended up embracing it, and we have used it for almost three years!

Nevertheless, I always feared our design didn’t look professional, or even worse, that it could look “engineered”… you know what they say about engineers who think they can design: there is nothing more dangerous than an engineer with some Photoshop knowledge and a bit of confidence! So for our next step as a company, we decided to go with professionals to design our visual identity.

Enter our new logo

This awesome new logo was designed by Studio Graphene, a London-based studio with plenty of experience working with startups like ours. We liked that they had worked with companies in the AR space before, and that they loved (and understood!) our tech. They quickly grasped the key elements defining our logo and what we wanted our brand to transmit, and their first sketches illustrate this very well:

“To elevate the brand we needed to unveil Volograms’ unique identity, in order for it to better reflect who they are and what they do. Volograms operate in a landscape that is deeply rooted in innovative technology like AI and AR, bringing upon visionary and imaginative solutions. Therefore, we created a distinctive set of logo, colour-way and typography that brings out all of the above elements. It becomes a celebration of the process and technology in use, whilst highlighting the creative and playful identity at the core of the brand.”

Karen Tsang, Digital Designer @ Studio Graphene

Our new visual identity builds on the ideas our previous logo introduced and takes them to a new innovative, creative and playful level. It doubles down on the triangle shape as the primitive with multiple meanings and embracing a new intriguing low-poly pattern that could have multiple 3D representations. It presents a unique asymmetrical polygonal shape that is distinctive and reminds our audience about our core 3D reconstruction technologies. And alongside the logo, a new sharp and elegant font that maintains minimalism and a playful look, and a colourway that is balanced between a range of monochrome and vibrant colours that resemble the colours used to represent the normals of a 3D model.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll see all our other visual elements aligning around our new identity: our website, imagery, documents and videos. And, more importantly, you will see our new identity in the new products coming up this year. We are really looking forward to showing them to you!

Stay tuned for more! 😎

Volumetric holograms in XR storytelling: next-level storytelling with real people in immersive media

By bringing real people into immersive experiences, volumetric holograms are disrupting AR & VR storytelling. With them, talented performances can be finally integrated into new media to tell stories, educate, move your audience, and spark emotions. Read this to discover:

• Why the human factor is critical for immersive media and how volumetric holograms can help get it right

• How to bring volumetric holograms into your own storytelling

• Most inspiring examples of stories told thanks to volumetric holograms

Where others see technology and innovation, some see new ways of telling stories. If that is you, thank you! People like you have helped us humans come a long way, from prehistoric cave paintings and the first printed words, to motion pictures and, most recently, immersive media. Visionaries like you push the boundaries of communication. We say thanks because storytelling is central to human existence and society development. Stories, our collective memory, can move people to tears, warm their hearts, make them laugh, blow their mind. Stories are therefore the most powerful tool to educate, convince, entertain, inspire and transform — all in all, they are the blood that flows to keep our culture and communities alive.

“The difference, perhaps, between ‘storytelling’ and ‘story living’.” Luke Buckmaster — on immersive and interactive filmmaking

New immersive technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR & VR) are enabling audiences to move beyond the limits of flat two-dimensional content. People seek to be immersed, to be active participants of the stories they experience, so they can walk around and explore. Be embodied. This presents a great opportunity for creators, as well as a challenge: telling stories in these formats is, in practice, unlike doing so in more traditional media. One of the key differences is that bringing the human factor in is not as straightforward as it is for other types of content. Immersive storytelling has the unique ability to teleport us to a whole new world — welcome to the land of stories! But, where are the characters that bring them to life?

**Humans: the central element**

Check your favourite movie, video, or news app — how many faces do you see? How many films can you recall without people acting in them? How many stories do you create or share that do not have someone in them?

!The Trinity Library Long Room Mixed Reality Project with V-SENSE, featuring Jonathan Swift’s vologram (played by an actor). More [here](assets/blog/Volumetric-holograms-in-XR-storytelling--next-level-storytelling-with-real-people-in-immersive--1.webp)

If stories are the nurturing blood of our culture and communities — we, humans, are the red cells that carry the oxygen within! For that reason, throughout history, we’ve developed sophisticated tools to capture real people into our evolving types of content. Photography did the trick for everything static and flat from newspapers to your Instagram grid. Video, still flat, set us in motion: from films to TikTok clips. But when it comes to AR and VR, how do we bring people into our stories? So far, instead of bringing real humans to these environments, we’ve gone for alternatives such as artificial animated characters, mostly cartoonish, created by 3D artists and developers. These alternatives may be cool, but let’s face it: this is not the same as having real people in it — be it Choi Min-shik, Morgan Freeman, Juliette Binoche or your homegrown local talent. Performers are artists in their own right and contribute something essential and unique to every story. Sadly, when actually attempted, efforts to bring real people to AR and VR often turn out uncanny at best, making it better to stay low-key (think of video cut-outs integrated virtually in the space) than to fail trying something more ambitious — see this for a more complete analysis of alternatives.

If we could bring real people into immersive experiences, the storytelling power and the possibilities of AR and VR would expand tremendously.

“I wanted people in the middle of the story, not outside in a flat way. This is just part of that trajectory. Our world is spatial, it isn’t flat.” Nonny de la Peña

**Going volumetric to enable AR and VR storytelling**

Luckily, a disruptive innovation has taken hold in the last few years: volumetric video. Also called volumetric capture, or simply volumetric, this evolution of video enables the capture of real people into volumetric holograms — we call them volograms. This means real people brought directly into digital, not in a flat way, but rather as full-3D content that can be seen from any perspective. In other words, with volumetric you can finally bring real people into your AR and VR stories, with their performances to be experienced in a completely immersive way. Volumetric video helps you create compelling stories like never before.

An advantage of volumetric video is that the capture process is simply the evolution of a normal green-screen video shooting. The process is very similar (finding the talent, preparing the script, make-up, and wardrobe, etc.) with the key difference that the performance is recorded from multiple angles at the same time. In general, you won’t need to think about how things will look from a specific perspective: your audience will choose.

In that way, volograms capture the acting and bring it directly into your immersive work. This ensures that you can spark nuanced emotions, capture memories with fidelity, notice subtle moves and unique clothing with natural realism, and empower your chosen talent to make your audience feel. Of course, this also means that volumetric does not work in the same way as 3D-avatars: you need to shoot the sequences you are interested in (which will be realistically reconstructed), rather than artificially configure with software what the character is going to do and say. Volumetric video enables a degree of post-production (e.g., adjustment of movements), but the more you edit it, the less life-like it will look. The power is in the performance!

“The power of actors and performers is that they are focused entirely on embodying a character, with years of training and talent, and without distraction by technology or process. Giving them the ability to explore your story, and bring something unique and surprising to the table, without the complexity of say, motion capture, is a revolution.” Anrick Bregman, Director at Studio ANRK — an Immersive XR studio

All in all, once the sequence is captured, you can integrate it within your AR and VR experiences and work with it as a normal 3D-asset. Your experience will still be compatible with your standard tools (Unity, Unreal, etc.) and the full range of devices: from the fanciest headsets to a standard smartphone with WebXR. As volumetric has roughly the file size of a high-quality video and tens of thousands of polygons, you will only need to make sure that you stay within the hard-drive and processing restrictions of the devices you are working with. Don’t worry: the first Hololens works with it, so you will manage.

**Very human and immersive stories**

Volumetric has been used in a great variety of content: VR filmmaking, immersive art, mobile augmented experiences, etc. To showcase this and inspire your creations, we’ve curated a list of some of the best pieces of work published internationally, which are only the tip of the iceberg. You just need to take a look at SXSW or Cannes to discover new and exciting pieces every year!

• Augmented Play & VR Play — the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies, in collaboration with V-SENSE and Volograms, published this award-winning reinterpretation of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece Play. Using only 5 DSLR cameras, the characters were volumetrically captured and integrated into the AR and VR experience in such a way that the audience can choose the sequence in which this piece develops, as if they were on the Director’s seat. | AR & VR | description | article

• Blade Runner 2049: Memory Lab — Magnopus created a VR sequel of a classic, the acclaimed Blade Runner. It not only impressed the world with its stunning use of technologies, but it also contributed nicely to the storyline of the big-screen sequel, Blade Runner 2049. One of the first top-level VR productions to showcase the power of volumetric. | VR | article | video | Oculus experience

• An Opera Set in Your Home — Google’s Creative Lab made it possible for Opera Queensland to share the magic of one of their grand music events for people to enjoy from their homes. This ambitious experience has set the stage for other institutions to follow. | AR | article

• Terminal 3 — This thought-provoking piece by disruptive studio 1RIC is especially interesting for two reasons. First, it uses volumetric video to make awareness-raising pieces more compelling through next-level, emotional human interactions. Second, it uses a light-weight and low-budget volumetric capture technology. | AR | article | making of

• Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds: The Immersive Experience — As one of the central pieces within the theatrical experience of the same name, London-based production company Dotdotdot created this intriguing piece that uses volumetric video for the most immersive scenes. Its smart combination of this new format with 360 videos is a great storytelling option. | VR | article | video

• 7 Miracles — this ambitious feature film, Raindance award-winner, produced by VIVE Studios and shot using 360 video, integrates a few volumetric sequences, which let the audience explore freely some of its key scenes. The combination of so-called 6-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) content within a long-format 3DOF production helps spectators engage further with the storyline. | VR | description | video | video 3DOF vs 6DOF | VIVEPORT experience | Google Play app

“The difference between the volumetric actor and the 2D actor, for me, it’s night and day. It feels real and I get a human resonance in response.” Camille Donegan, CEO and Producer at Virtual Reality Ireland

In general, the previous use-cases intend to be a source of inspiration and a summary of what has worked best in the past for ourselves and our clients. However, you are best placed to understand how to integrate volograms in your experiences to add value to your own customers.

**What’s your take?**

Even with all this exciting work already available, immersive storytelling is in its early days. We can barely imagine how things will look like in two years from now, let alone in the longer term. We hope this article inspires you and all creators and artists to jump behind the cameras, regardless of story types and its budget size, and unleash your creative talent. The power of human stories in AR and VR will only be realised thanks to it!

If you want to make your immersive masterpiece come to life with real people, come talk to us and we’ll help you take your storytelling to the next level. Follow us on Twitter to discover more exciting work by us and stay updated.

Volumetric holograms in Tourism and Culture: how to engage visitors with real people in immersive media

Digital tools are helping the Tourism and Culture sectors grab the attention of many. However, reaching with them the engagement levels of traditional human-led activities is a big challenge. Volumetric holograms bring together the best of both worlds with real people in digital immersive experiences. Read this to discover:

• Why immersive media and volumetric holograms are combination

• How to bring volumetric holograms into your touristic or cultural experience

• Best examples we’ve seen so far that will inspire your ideas

Reinvention. That’s an inherent value of the Tourism sector — a sector that has reinvented itself over and over through the unprecedented rate of historic transformations of the last few decades. From internationalisation and the revolution of free online information, to influencers, social media and the everything-can-be-reviewed that came along… even pandemics and travel restrictions. The role of heritage/leisure sites, cultural institutions, local authorities, and many other institutions, and the companies that support them, is not anymore just to provide an enjoyable visit (if only this was an easy task!). Nowadays, the visitor journey begins much earlier than the actual visit, and ends much later.

“Traveling — It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan explorer who widely traveled the medieval world

From the moment potential visitors start searching online for the best things to do at their new destination, to the moment they share their journey highlights with their friends, family, and followers, there are tons of moments to delight and engage or disappoint and miss. This needs to be seen as an end-to-end experience, and efforts must lead to strengthen, ease and add excitement to all stages within it. In particular, there are plenty of opportunities for visitors (future, current or past) to create pieces of so-called user-generated content. These opportunities, when positive, do not only enhance their own experience, but also become the best reference for others to follow their steps. From a kind booking confirmation that people post on social media with heart emojis, to selfie-worthy visit highlights, almost everything is susceptible to become user-generated content… but visitors are becoming increasingly hard to impress.

**Immersive technologies to enhance the visitor experience end-to-end**

One of the most effective tools to impress visitors and enhance their experience is immersive media. Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and the whole ecosystem they create together (which many call extended reality, XR) can be deployed at virtually every step of the journey.

For example, VR can be used:

• From home: providing a virtual pre-tour of your site, for instance. In fact, VR is the alternative that resembles the physical experience more accurately in times when travel restrictions or closing periods make the actual visit impossible. This may be made available on PCs, smartphones, or even VR headsets — PCs and smartphones maximise accessibility, while headsets maximise immersiveness.

• On premises: providing a way to discover inaccessible areas or historic views, for example. You may lend or rent out VR headsets or tablets, prepare suitable spaces with immersive projections, or simply develop mobile content for people to use with their own devices during the visit.

In a complementary way, AR can be used:

• From home: bringing elements of the touristic or cultural experience to your visitor’s home. This may be a preview of a visit highlight, such as an extraordinary object or landmark that the user can place in their own living room. These can be for smartphones, tablets, and headsets.

• On premises: augmenting the actual visit with digital elements (maybe providing context on what people have in front of them), for instance. The device options are the same as for the previous.

Watch video →

Regardless of the example or platform used, if you have tried AR/VR experiences before, you may have felt some of them a bit empty. The truth is that moving through a virtual gallery or exploring an AR object is not necessarily more, or even as engaging as it is in person. AR and VR experiences definitely have the potential to be more engaging than traditional ones (and we’ll discuss great examples of this), but this potential needs harnessing.

Even in-person experiences require storytelling elements to make an impact. Simple information signs, elaborated audio-guides, and, of course, dedicated professional guides massively contribute to making visits more engaging. They share the unique story behind what you are seeing. Well, the same applies for immersive enhancements: displaying a place or an object, even in the coolest way, doesn’t add much value without the story behind them. To address that in AR/VR, you may add textual references (digital equivalent of info signs), audio explanations or sound effects (digital equivalent of audio-guides); but, for real impact, we know there is nothing more engaging than the human factor.

“You don’t experience your world as flat, you experience it with volume, so why would you want your media to be that way?” Nonny de la Peña

It’s not only about guides — we often see actors or performers representing historic or relevant characters to enhance visits. Sometimes, it’s even the curator or art director behind an exhibition, or the talent that the tourist attraction celebrates — an artist, a politician, a celebrity… — in fact, anyone that can impress, entertain, guide or educate your visitors. Isn’t the idea of making that possible in your immersive experiences brilliant? Plus, by going immersive, you don’t depend on their physical availability to get their presence anymore: similar to good old videos, one performance can be enjoyed by countless visitors!

That sounds great, but you might still feel that bringing real people into AR/VR experiences sounds too futuristic… good news: it isn’t!

**The human factor, solved**

Volumetric video (also called volumetric capture, or simply volumetric) enables the capture of real people into volumetric holograms, or volograms. As an evolution of normal video, volumetric video captures reality directly into digital, but instead of doing so as a flat or static representation, it captures full 3D content that can be seen from any perspective and moves as in reality. In other words, it is a technological solution to bring human beings into new media and immersive experiences. With it, real people can populate AR and VR spaces to boost visitor engagement beyond traditional limits.

Watch video →

There are other solutions for this, but the results are not the same. You may use avatars or 3D-animated characters, but their aspect and digital animations will provide your experience a video game look-and-feel — the difference is similar as that between an animated film and a live-action one. Similarly, you may use billboards or other video-based solutions, but the immersion will disappear as soon as your visitors move in the immersive experience and see that it is a flat video without perspective. With volumetric, visitors can actually walk around the volograms in the AR/VR experience, getting an unparalleled sense of presence. For a comprehensive analysis and comparison of alternatives, check this article out.

You don’t need to take our word for it; to date, volumetric video has already been successfully integrated in countless experiences around the globe.

Volumetric stories of smart tourism

Here you have some of the world’s best tourist experiences using volumetric:

• VR Ireland helped Manorhamilton Castle attract and engage visitors with the possibility of meeting the ghost of Sir Frederick Hamilton, a historic lord of the castle, whose spirit is said to still live there. Fantasy or reality, visitors with AR-capable tablets report insistently that they have seen him. | On-site | mobile AR | article | video

• Trigger Global helped Royal Caribbean Cruises’ CEO and Chairman personally welcome their customers and guide them through an augmented tour of their cruises. Of course, the press coverage of the campaign generally boosted their brand as well. | On-site | mobile AR | article

• Google’s Creative Lab made it possible for Opera Queensland to share the magic of one of their grand music events for people to enjoy from their homes. This ambitious experience has set the stage for other institutions to follow. | Remote | mobile AR | article

• Microsoft helped The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum inspire their visitors by enabling them to meet Dr. Mae Jemison in person. Using Microsoft’s AR headset, Hololens, visitors could also learn more about previously unknown women from the US space program. | On-site | AR headset | video

• Hammerhead provided The Viking Planet with the core experience for their top-tier attraction is Oslo. This award winning VR drama immerses the visitor in a memorable journey across the viking land and sea. | On-site | VR headset | article

• The Centre of Architecture and the Visual Arts (CAVA) led the design of a set of immersive experiences for St George’s Hall, UK. With them, they explored a variety of possibilities to engage the visitors of this 19th century UNESCO heritage site. | On-site | Various platforms | article

“For me it is night and day. It feels real. I feel human resonance and response.” Camille Donegan, CEO and Producer at Virtual Reality Ireland

As you can see, the examples cover a variety of platforms and devices: from mobile apps that visitors can download on-site or remotely, to tablets, even headsets, that are made available on site (similar to traditional audio-guides). On top of that, there are two new and exciting technologies that are opening new possibilities:

• WebXR (and its individual components, WebAR and WebVR): accessing AR or VR experiences directly from your PC or mobile web browser (no need to download an app). See this example by Draw&Code and 8th Wall technology.

• Holographic displays: they can showcase volumetric content without the need for any handheld or head-mounted device. See this example by Looking Glass.

What will you bring to life?

We hope these examples of volumetric video enhancing visitor experiences inspire you to bring your own destination to life. With such a new technology, the most important part is not what has been created, but what will be created next.

If you are looking for new pieces to surprise your visitors, designing a site that needs to open with a bang, planning an innovative trail to highlight your town’s best or simply looking at strengthening your current proposition, volumetric will help you get there. The tagline: boost visitor engagement by bringing your immersive content alive.

Get in touch with us to do all this and much more by bringing volograms to your immersive projects. Follow us on Twitter to discover more exciting work by us and stay updated.

Volumetric holograms in Marketing and Communications: how to engage customers and key stakeholders with real people in immersive media

Volumetric holograms, that bring real people into immersive media, have made it to the headlines with breathtaking campaigns including Madonna’s performance at the Billboard Music Awards or the home visit which famous politicians have paid to all their constituents through augmented reality. Read further to learn:

• Why volumetric holograms matter

• Best examples to spark your creativity, arranged by platform: VR, AR and others

• How to bring volumetric holograms into your own work

“We really need to wow our audience this time!” — A sentence that often resonates in our minds and work meetings. Doesn’t it? Whether you work in branding, creativity, communications, or any other role that requires you to engage with your customers, employees, or other stakeholders, the need to get your message heard is simply crucial. However, with thousands of organisations working through tens of channels to engage the same audience as you, it’s very hard to cut through the noise. How can you grab your audience’s attention and get the conversation started? It would be amazing if we all had the budget for massive social media campaigns, best conference stands, or breathtaking events to impress everyone. But the reality is that, in a world of media saturation, we need to find smarter ways to get noticed and deliver our message.

“In a busy marketplace, not standing out is the same as being invisible.” Seth Godin

**Getting noticed thanks to immersive media**

More and more, Marketing and Communication professionals are looking for solutions in new or immersive media. Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and the whole ecosystem they create together (which many unify as extended reality, XR) are tools of great potential — and AR/VR studios are there to help you work with them. From targeted activations using the most sophisticated devices to viral mobile AR effects using social media, there is a whole spectrum of solutions that, if well used, will definitely attract the eyes of many. However, the next challenge shows up: will your AR/VR asset be able to deliver an effective first message? This is, in fact, a big challenge because traditionally immersive storytelling has been held back by its lack of a few key resources that are intensively used when creating picture or video-based content. Perhaps the single most important example of these is the lack of technology to bring real people to life in AR/VR content and deliver the message. Luckily, we are finding solutions for most of this and other limitations.

It only takes a quick look at existing media to realise the importance of people in any kind of visual content. It might be a celebrity, an influencer or simply a normal person — people are always central to the way we communicate. In AR and VR, in contrast, we live in the cartoon era: real people are replaced by cartoon avatars or 3D-animated characters. Sometimes billboards or similar video-based solutions are used instead, but, with that, the immersive wow factor is lost. Sometimes it is even worse, and the human component is directly removed from the storyline — for a comprehensive analysis and comparison of alternatives, check this article out. All in all, immersive media have been missing real people — and, without real people, the message they transmit feels somehow empty!

**The human factor, solved**

“Wonder is honest. It’s completely innocent. It can’t be artificially evoked. For me, there’s no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling.” Andrew Stanton, film director, Pixar

Volumetric video (also called volumetric capture, or simply volumetric) is bridging this gap, capturing real people into volumetric holograms, volograms. As an evolution of normal video, volumetric captures reality directly into digital, but instead of doing so as a flat representation, it captures full 3D content that can be seen from any perspective. In other words, it is the technological solution that brings real people into new media and immersive experiences. With it, real people can populate AR, VR and other types of 3D spaces as they populate your social media videos, TV ads, etc.

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At this stage you might be wondering: “this sounds great, but how can I use it?” Well, volograms can be used in many kinds of assets for Marketing and Communications, and delivered to a variety of devices, from the latest XR headset to a standard smartphone. To make it clearer and inspire you, let’s get hands-on some great examples. We have collated some of the best pieces of work published internationally, which are only the tip of the iceberg!

**Warming up VR experiences with human charm**

Thanks to the increasing accessibility of VR headsets like those from Oculus, HTC Vive, Varjo, and especially standalone ones like Oculus Quest, more and more companies are engaging with their customers, employees and key stakeholders through VR. This medium enables high-impact experiences through which your audience immerses themselves in remote or imaginary worlds without leaving their homes, your office, the conference stand, etc. They typically have one of two alternative objectives:

• First, targeting VR headset owners specifically, in which case you can use app stores like Steam to spread the word.

• Second, and most commonly, delivering in-person activations — in which you, or your client, provide the VR headset.

In either case, your volograms can perform any piece in front of your audience, show them around, educate them on your products, communicate your corporate results… you name it!

“Volumetric video is a new way of communicating and explaining complex concepts and products. It makes everything in the experience come together to connect with the customer.” Edgar Martin-Blas, Virtual Voyagers

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• Virtual Voyagers helped Acciona take their key customers for a worldwide tour, guided by Lux, visiting renewal energy installations. Lux makes this complex high-tech tour understandable and memorable for all clients (in-person: Oculus Quest) — article

• AirFrance included life-like attendants in a trade show experience to showcase their Business class. This brings human warmth into the intriguing exploration (in-person: HTC Vive) — press release | video

• Microsoft helped Gatorade demonstrate the importance of hydration with an American football VR game. In it, users get coached by former All-Pro quarterback Peyton Manning, an opportunity that is otherwise unthinkable for most (app stores: Steam and Oculus) — video | Oculus app | Steam app

• Hammerhead helped Sky promote the new season of their TV series Britannia in a freely distributed interactive VR experience with real actors. This experience not only got fans excited, but called the attention of many new watchers (app stores: Steam and Oculus) — article | Oculus app | Steam app

You might be wondering why we haven’t mentioned VR for smartphones. Well, the reality is that we haven’t seen any compelling experience in that format so far. But we are sure someone will make it work!

**One-to-one with your audience thanks to AR**

AR has become the new arena on which professionals can compete to reach their audiences effectively. The impact is comparable with that of VR — although you are not taking people to a new reality, you are enhancing their current one. The unparalleled advantage is that mobile AR is really compelling — and it is compatible with most iOS and Android devices, so accessibility is not an issue. Of course, experiences based on AR headsets such as Hololens, Magic Leap One and Nreal are even more impressive — that’s why, despite their price, they are still used for very targeted campaigns. A very exciting possibility that recent technology developments have made possible is WebAR, which means accessing AR experiences directly from your mobile web browser (no need to download an app).

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• V-SENSE helped the Provost of Trinity College Dublin wow event attendants by delivering a keynote speech as a hologram — definitely the keynote that more people watched afterwards on LinkedIn (in-person: Hololens) — article

• The Office of the President of Israel enabled the Israeli president to visit people’s homes safely during the COVID lock-down by opening a simple link with their smartphones. As it went viral, he actually visited the homes of many more internationally (WebAR: 8th Wall) — article | link

• Nexus Studios helped AT&T showcase the potential of 5G by letting some giant (and wild) Dallas Cowboys players meet the stadium visitors in a unique way, which reached mass-scale through the user-generated content that followed (in-person: mobile AR app) — article

• Jadu empowers several music artists and influencers to engage with their worldwide followers creating micro music clips together that they can later share on social media, generating a neat network effect (app stores: mobile AR app) — website and app

• Trigger Global helped Royal Caribbean Cruises’ CEO and Chairman personally welcome their customers and guide them through an augmented tour of their cruises. Of course, the press coverage of the campaign generally boosted their brand as well (in-person: mobile AR app) — article

• Burger King released a volumetric video of Tinie Tempah to engage with their audience, launch his new track WHOPPA and asked everyone to create videos with their Whopper burger and Tinie’s vologram. #WhoppaOnAWhopper (mobile web AR) — Twitter Burger King, Trend on Twitter

Are AR & VR not enough to convince your audience?

Volumetric can be used in formats that do not strictly belong to AR or VR. Here you can find some creative examples:

• Looking Glass helped Volograms showcase their work to conference booth visitors, who could see volograms in action without the need for any handheld device or headset (in-person: holographic display) — article

• Sky Sports added a new dimension to their broadcast of the Golf Open Championship by bringing in volumetric players to show their swing from any angle, in bullet time (TV broadcast) — article

• Arcturus made it possible for 5 Madonnas to overwhelm Maluma on stage with a ground-breaking music awards performance. Many worldwide became aware of the Billboard Music Awards thanks to this (TV broadcast) — article | video

**When will you surf the volumetric wave?**

There are a myriad ways volumetric has been deployed in the past. However, what excites us the most is what is yet to come! As a disruptive type of content, its capacities are barely explored. Think of it, pretty much every campaign we are referencing is from the last two years… What will the next 2 years bring us? Will you be part of it?

Whether you are launching a new innovative product, looking to wow your customers with one of those moments of delight, sharing your annual results with your employees in a memorable way, or keynoting for real impact, volumetric will help you get there. The essence: you can finally deliver your message in a unique way, bringing yourself, your brand ambassadors, your customer personas, or anyone you want, into the new wave of Marketing and Communication platforms.

Whether you are a professional who wants to cut through the noise or you run a studio or agency that wants to offer this capability to your own clients, get in touch with us to bring volograms into immersive projects. Follow us on Twitter to discover more exciting work by us and stay updated.

How to bring a 3D human hologram in your next immersive project?

Update (May 2023): Since releasing this blog, we have launched two new products at Volograms.

1. Vologram Messages — the easiest way to create a WebAR experience with a 3D volumetric hologram. Just record a video with your smartphone or camera, and we’ll do the rest.

2. Volu Pro (Beta) — Export volograms from Volu and bring it into the 3D platform of your choice (Unity, Unreal, Blender etc.)

Today, 3D digital media technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are at the early stages of global market development and they will have a profound impact on the way we use, consume and capture media in the coming years. There are already more than 1 billion AR/VR compatible devices and over 5 million VR headsets were sold last year. As these technologies become more mainstream, it will be important to create even more content that provides value, leads to higher engagement, and immerses a user in AR and VR.

It is pretty obvious that, for all this new content to be valuable, engaging and immersive, humans (yes, humans like you and I!) will play a critical role in it. Whether you turn on the TV, pick up your phone, or simply head out for a walk, a quick interaction with any medium shows the dominating prevalence of content with people in it. Most of the times when we watch TV or play games, we are spending time observing human actors or human avatars interacting with each other. Humans are central to the content we consume, in any channel or form. A quick glance at your home page on YouTube will give you an idea of the high percentage of content with people in it.

AR and VR technologies transform the user from a passive viewer, who can only watch the content, to an active viewer, who has the capability to engage with the content by moving in and around it. Due to the active engagement in the content, creators need to be mindful of the form they are bringing humans in. For these reasons above, in this article, we are going to specifically focus on different ways of creating content for AR and VR with humans in it.

How to create content for AR and VR with humans in it?

Have you ever seen someone in AR or VR? Seeing another person is one of the most amazing experiences you can have in immersive media! It is quite unlike any other medium except a real-life face-to-face interaction. However, bringing a human in AR or VR comes at quite a cost (for now!).

Photography empowered us to bring real people into static visual media (from newspapers and street ads to Instagram). Video did its part for dynamic visual content (from TV and films to YouTube). Creating or capturing humans in AR/VR is still not as accessible and standard as snapping a picture or recording a video using a smartphone, and most methods that deliver compelling results still need specialised expertise or costly professional software. So making a decision about it is not straightforward.

The key reason for this is that bringing humans to AR and VR is quite the technological challenge! For starters, it is way more difficult than creating objects and environments in 3D. Why? Firstly, the human body structure is more complex than that of a table or chair and therefore more difficult to replicate. Second and more importantly, we are especially attuned to human movements like a smile, wave of a hand, or a wink. So, we notice even the smallest discrepancy in human movements when they are not life-like (remember the uncanny valley effect?). And finally, animation of humans, especially for immersive media like AR/VR, is time consuming and has many difficulties. How can we get this right and deliver the best results for our content?

We’ve done a deep dive into the methods and the advantages and disadvantages of each. Here’s a brief overview of what we’ll be discussing so you can navigate it easily:

• Methodology to distinguish between different methods to bring humans to immersive media

• Customisable avatars: Analysis

• 3D designs: Analysis

• Animated 3D scans: Analysis

• 2D Billboards: Analysis

• Volumetric Video: Analysis

• Animation: Motion capture vs Synthetic animation vs Volumetric video

Each section about the methods has a summary at the end for all you TL;DR readers. 🤓

How to figure out which method fits your needs?

Most of the methods to bring humans to immersive experiences in AR and VR are useful for different reasons, and different methods fit different use cases. So, before jumping in to analyse the different methods and simplify your decision making, we built a list of key factors you can consider.

• Fidelity: extent to which the appearance of the virtual human is similar to a real human.

• Animatability: extent to which the virtual human’s movements can be changed after creation or capture.

• Immersiveness: extent to which the user loses the awareness that they are not looking at a real human

• Cost: amount of financial and other resources needed to create or capture the virtual human.

• Time: period needed from when the virtual human creation or capture starts until it is ready to integrate into the content.

Let’s investigate the methods considering the parameters we discussed above.

Customisable avatars

Digital avatars (sometimes also called synthetic humans), as we know them now, are customized figures that represent people in a digital space. They range from very cartoon-ish ones to fairly realistic ones. The best-known examples of these figures for the general public are Bitmoji, Apple’s Memoji, and Facebook avatars, but you can find many companies specialised in using these for AR/VR integration. These avatars are normally highly customizable, allowing you to change the skin color, hair, clothes, accessories, height etc. very easily. Let’s discuss how they fit in AR/VR experiences and what are they best for.

!Customisable avatar animated using motion capture technology ([Source)](assets/blog/How-to-bring-a-3D-human-hologram-in-your-next-immersive-project--3.webp)

Fidelity: We need to differentiate the two types: First, the avatars that are highly stylized, such as those that look like cartoons, have low fidelity. Their advantage is that the human eye doesn’t expect their appearance or motions to exactly resemble another human being — in other words, we are pretty comfortable with cartoon characters (even if 3D).

Other types of avatars attempt to reach high fidelity,using very realistic features. The challenge is that, automatically, our brain analyses them way more in depth, and even small details may make us feel there is something creepy about them.

An interesting aspect is that certain avatar solutions enable you to automatically customise your avatar (typically using a picture of a person).

Animatability: In general, one of the strengths of this solution is that avatars are typically designed for their ease of customisation and animation. Depending on the avatar solution, you will be able to implement a wider or narrower variety of gestures and postures. Also, they might come with a library of movements (comprehensive or small) or may allow you to import your own ones.

Immersiveness: Low-fidelity avatars tend to be a much better choice than wanna-be high-fidelity ones. In any case, you wouldn’t feel that you are sharing the space with a real human being, but that might not be necessary or convenient for the work you are delivering.

Cost: There are cartoonish solutions integrated with specific AR/VR platforms which are free. Still limited but more complete, easily accessible avatar solutions can be found on standard repositories such as the Unity asset store at a very low cost. On the other end of the spectrum, you can find high-quality, mo-cap animated, AI-powered avatars from specialised vendors.

Time: This is arguably the biggest strength of this solution. Customising and configuring the animations for an avatar is, in general, a very fast process, provided that the tools you are using have the customisation and animation options that you are looking for. If any tailoring is needed, it can become a problematic and long process or simply impossible, e.g., if you want to move the eyebrows of an avatar that doesn’t provide that option.

Summary: Avatars are a great solution for content that doesn’t require real fidelity or immersiveness. Their animatability and quick turnaround make them a strong option for content that requires a lot of interactivity, such as training simulators, games and any other kind of gamified content (in fact, traditional video game characters can be considered avatars). However, you should look for an alternative if you want real immersiveness, or to impress your audience with the quality and fidelity of your content. We haven’t seen a realistic avatar solution that doesn’t feel creepy or doesn’t continuously remind you that you are in a video game (not reality).

3D design

3D design of humans is the process of creating human characters from scratch using specialised software — in layman’s terms, like painting a person, but in 3D. A 3D artist or a professional designer creates the model up to a specific level of detail and then rigs it with a digital skeleton, so that it can be animated. As the result, you will get a unique avatar built to your very needs from the ground up, rather than just customised, as was the case for the first option we introduced. Of course, designing a 3D character with detailed characteristics which resembles a real human requires incredible expertise; top 3D experts tailor the visual aspect of the digital human so that it matches with the character personality and psychology. To reduce complexity, designers often start from a predefined model, a 3D-scan, a library of body models, leading to hybrid techniques and results. 3D designed characters are not only used in AR and VR, they have been extensively used in movies in the past to create our favorite non-human characters such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean, Woody in Toy Story and some human character such as Hero boy in The polar express.

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Fidelity: you can go for different appearance styles: cartoonish, realistic, fantastical, etc. With the right artists, tools, time, and budget, you can achieve a level of fidelity that is very hard to reach for other methods.

Animatability: this depends on the quality of your 3D design. Well-designed 3D-characters can be animated up to an incredible level of detail — top studios even power their designs with deep learning engines so that everything, even the skin colour slightly varies with the movements. In practice, for a normal immersive project, you can design a character with standard tools and a reasonable level of animatability (to enable walking, talking, etc.), but don’t expect great levels of realism.

Immersiveness: again, very dependent on the quality of your design. If done with skill, 3D design can lead to high levels of immersiveness. Low quality designs can lead to very creepy results or simply to a general low-end impression for the whole immersive experience.

Cost: depending on your approach, 3D design may be the most expensive solution of them all. You will need to have in-house talent to create and animate the design or to outsource such talent. Additionally, depending on your choice, 3D design tools and hardware can also come at a remarkable expense.

Time: it can take a 3D design artist months to develop a human character up to the right level of quality. Similarly, a character for a feature film, a triple-A game, or a top-notch immersive production can take a team of professional designers weeks to develop. It can be done faster, but that involves a trade-off in terms of either cost or quality.

Summary: 3D design is probably the best solution for very high-end content that requires unique characters in AR/VR that are not a real person you can directly capture from reality (see volumetric video and 3D scanning below), e.g., a fictional character — this is the reason it is used for top-level films and video games. Otherwise, 3D design might be a decent solution if you are not going for great quality, but want to have such tailored characters that you can’t generate by customising an avatar — this is assuming that you have the right talent and equipment in your team (or the right budget) to do or outsource the 3D design. The type of design will have to be tailored to your use-case (e.g., high animatability for interactive content such as gamified experiences).

3D scanning + animation

3D scanning is a process of analyzing an object/person in the real world using specialised technology (hardware and software) to generate a digital 3D copy of it, often called a ‘digital twin’ or simply 3D scan. There are various technologies that enable 3D scanning of people, The most common being depth sensors and photogrammetry. Depth sensors calculate the distance between an object and the sensor itself in order to reconstruct the volume observed in 3D, while photogrammetry uses pictures of the person taken from different positions and angles, and stitches them together into a 3D model using specialised software. 3D scans of human beings are, as such, like a still digital sculpture: they need to be rigged with a digital skeleton and be digitally “skinned” so that they can be animated. In other words, joints and moving parts of the model need to be identified and programmed so that they can move and its form doesn’t change crazily when doing so.

!Carles Puyol, 3D scanned and motion captured for the VR game Legends of Catalonia ([Source)](assets/blog/How-to-bring-a-3D-human-hologram-in-your-next-immersive-project--5.webp)

Fidelity: There are different levels of quality available depending on what you can afford. Hollywood studios use high-quality 3D scanning rigs, but you can achieve a basic 3D scan using multiple photos from your smartphone camera. The fidelity problems come with animation: it is extremely difficult to artificially rig and skin a 3D scan so that the movement works well — it often leads to a robotic or puppet-like effect, unnatural in general. For a simple analogy that reflects how complex this is, think of taking a picture and then animating it artificially to create a video (and that’s only 2D!). Achieving this with fidelity for 3D with a static scan can only be done by teams of qualified 3D artists in top studios — there’s no automated tool that gets good results.

Animatability: As discussed, this is the big limitation of 3D scanning. 3D scans are, by nature, static. Rigging and skinning are ongoing technology challenges and standard tools don’t provide compelling results without the intervention of skilled artists. However, if fidelity and immersiveness are not a priority, there are software solutions that will do the trick.

Immersiveness: 3D scans in the hands of a team of 3D experts, if captured and animated at high standards, can capture compelling digital humans to help a highly immersive experience. 3D scans of all levels of quality, with standard rigging and skinning techniques, have a very artificial and uncanny look-and-feel.

Cost: If you want to develop your own 3D-scanning capacities up to a level of quality, a 3D scanning rig will typically require the purchase of dozens of cameras, plus accessories. Photogrammetry software is affordable and running the reconstruction is not rocket science (although it is an art to obtain top-quality results). Another option is to hire a 3D-scan studio for specific jobs, which may even be less costly. If neither option works, you can also capture a person with a single camera from different angles and reconstruct to get a 3D human, but that would be a time-consuming and detail oriented process.

Again, the problem comes with turning the 3D scan into an animatable digital human — you need either great 3D expertise in your team or expensive software solutions that may not even provide the most exciting results.

Time: if you have your 3D scan rig or have access to a company providing that service, the capture of the 3D model is not a time-consuming process. Like mentioned above, 3D scan can be done using a single camera capturing a person from different angles too but that requires time and some level of expertise.

Standard animation isn’t a time consuming process, but will lead you to limited results. To get to a decent level of quality, you will need much longer timelines for the post-capture process. This article on how Warner Music created an engaging experience for fans of the musician CARYS is a good example of the work that goes behind creating a professional dynamic 3D model from a 3D-scan and the results it delivers after using mocap to create the movements. You can check out the final result here:

Summary: 3D scan combined with animation has traditionally been the go-to method to bring real humans not only into AR and VR, but also into other 3D worlds (like VFX or video games). It is a very powerful tool in the hands of a qualified team of 3D designers that can make the 3D scan move in a realistic way (that’s why film studios use it). In the very likely case that you don’t have such a team within your company, 3D-scan might not be your option for digital humans — as discussed, standard rigging and skinning techniques make models look very artificial, sometimes even uncanny. In which case you would be sacrificing immersiveness in order to have your desired real person in the AR/VR experience. Volumetric video (see below) solves this issue, providing you with a radically more natural result, except in one situation: if you are creating a long piece of AR/VR content or one with multiple characters (e.g., a game) — in that case, volumetric video, which implies bigger file sizes than 3D-scanning with animations may saturate the processing or storage capacity of your software or device.

2D billboards

A 2D billboard is a normal video clip, integrated in a 3D space to make it feel as if it was there in 3D. This may do the trick for AR/VR experiences in which you can’t really move around (the so-called three degrees of freedom or 3DOF, in which, even if you physically move, the position from which you see your virtual environment, including the billboard won’t change). In simpler and worse implementations, the billboard looks like a flat cardboard in a movie stage, breaking the immersiveness of the experience.

!2D billboards. Notice how the static humans in it always face the camera? [Source](assets/blog/How-to-bring-a-3D-human-hologram-in-your-next-immersive-project--7.webp)

Fidelity: as a piece of video, 2D billboards might offer high fidelity when seen from one angle (think of a piece of 4K video integrated in your view). However, it is limited to a very specific perspective, regardless of how you move. Also, it can’t be integrated with the 3D effects and lighting that your AR/VR experience provides, so it is hard for it to depict depth.

Animatability: 2D billboards are almost impossible to animate. Whatever you record in the original video is what you work with. Video editing techniques, like the ones used for deep fake clips, may help you tweak the action a little, but you won’t be able to create an interactive piece beyond a very basic choose-your-own-adventure kind of interaction.

Immersiveness: 2D billboards are not immersive and are an unnatural solution to AR/VR, where the user typically can move around the people in the content. They might feel okay under very specific circumstances (3DOF, specific lighting, etc.). Even if you are not moving, the human eye perceives that there is something too flat about that person in your view, and it will not feel like a proper immersive experience. In general, billboards do the trick in immersive applications when the content is not close to the user’s position and the depth effect is minimal.

Cost: this is the biggest strength of 2D billboards. Creating them means producing normal videos of people (with or without a green-screen), and then segmenting the background out. The hardware is not expensive at all and, with the right software or a bit of time, you won’t need specialised skills for the segmentation. Integrating the piece into your AR/VR content in a way that doesn’t look bad might be a greater challenge — doing it in a basic manner does not provide good results, but is very low-cost.

Time: the video shooting is fast and the green-screen segmentation should not take too long, except for some tricky sequences. As such, the time needed will strongly depend on how much you want to work to integrate the content so that it doesn’t show that it is a billboard.

Summary: 2D billboards are not ideal for a proper AR/VR experience. As soon as users move, if not before, the magic spell will be broken. However, there are 3 instances in which we recommend 2D billboards:

a) when your budget is extremely limited, but you really need to bring a specific person into the experience (so that a standard customisable avatar won’t do the trick);

b) for people in the far background, at a position in the (virtual) space the user will never get close to;

c) when what you are actually looking for is simply the look-and-feel of high-definition video in a AR or VR space; for example, this might be helpful for you to very accurately describe textures, transparencies, hair, and other elements that are hard to reproduce with fidelity in 3D.

Volumetric video

Volumetric video (VV) is a technology that captures a person or a moving object and generates a sequence of 3D models. In other words, volumetric video is to 3D scan what video is to photography — in general, you can consider each frame of a volumetric video a 3D scan. As it captures reality directly, you can use it to bring real people accurately into AR/VR. As it is 3D, you can see the content from any angle, in contrast to flat elements, like 2D billboards. Technologically, volumetric video is, like 3D-scan, based on multi-camera rigs, which can include depth sensors. In fact, a volumetric capture rig is very much a 3D-scan rig that is set up to record videos instead of pictures.

Watch video →

Fidelity: this is one of the key strengths of volumetric video. The advantage is that the shape and the movements are not generated separately (as for all the other methods apart from 2D billboards), instead, the moving human is directly captured in 3D. No other method is capable of reaching this level of natural fidelity without the supervision of a quality artist. Similar to other techniques, VV offers different levels of fidelity depending on your budget and your deployment platform. Sophisticated rigs with over 100 cameras can provide very high-quality. This might be an overkill for most purposes, as you can obtain very realistic results with fifteen cameras when you use the most advanced volumetric video reconstruction software. Simpler rigs, based on a couple of depth sensors and cameras, may deliver results, but they will be noisy, low-res or simply not fully 3D.

Animatability: Volumetric video is, like normal video , designed so that animations are not needed. You capture the movements and actions that you need for your AR/VR experience from reality, so that it has the maximum fidelity. In turn, volumetric video is limited in terms of re-animating: you can rig it and skin it (like a 3D scan) with the risk of losing the authenticity and fidelity of the original capture. It has two key advantages over 3D-scans:

• first, you have built-in information on how the human moves, so you can accurately determine the digital skeleton driving the motion

• second, instead of re-animating it fully, you can use the original movements and tweak them to fit your story better (e.g., change the timing, the gaze, the direction) — in fact, there are companies that specialise in this kind of post-production for volumetric content. In future, deep learning systems will likely learn from the original volumetric video to animate captures with new, but realistic movements.

Immersiveness: Sharing a space with a volumetric human would be next best to real-life interaction. Like video, general appearance and movements, even emotions, are captured with fidelity allowing the emotive expressions and response to be as real as it is. As it is full-3D and volumetric characters can be integrated in the real (AR) or virtual (VR) space and experienced from any angle, they deliver full immersion. Small effects can be added to make the experience even more compelling: for example, making the volumetric person follow the viewer with their gaze (without changing any other movements).

Cost: If you want to set up your own volumetric setup, the simplest setups are good for starters or prosumers and are reasonably affordable, but will not deliver professional results. The most sophisticated setups may cost up to a million, but they can produce really high-end results. Alternatively, you can set your own professional rig with a level of investment that will likely be returned with your first paid AR/VR project. In fact, the space needed might be the most expensive resource needed in top cities around the world — that’s why portable rigs, though more expensive, might be a good investment if having a permanent space is your limitation. If you prefer to work with a volumetric capture studio for one-off projects, the cost is higher than 2D billboards and standard avatars, but likely lower than 3D design or 3D scan and animation, and volumetric video offers a higher quality. In general, you don’t need specialised talent beyond someone with the skills to integrate the volumetric human into your AR/VR work — which most 3D content developers should be capable of, unless you want to post-produce or re-animate your captures.

Time: this is one of the strengths of volumetric vs its direct quality alternatives (3D design and 3D scan with high-end animation). The first step is the capture, which takes about as much time as a normal video shoot. Processing the videos used to be a lengthy process, but current cloud solutions have enabled processing in a matter hours, or even minutes. Another advantage is that, generally, the results are ready to be integrated into your experience straight out of the processing pipeline.

Summary: If the focus of your AR/VR content is on humans, capturing and communicating emotional, educational, immersive media in a human way, volumetric video is likely the best choice for you. This is especially true if you need to bring a specific person into your content, such as a celebrity, brand ambassador, company executive, or artist. You will bring your content to life with their real, unique characteristics and mannerisms. There is an important caveat to this: if your content is highly interactive (e.g., video game) or you require very long sequences, you will need to combine volumetric video with a rigging and skinning technique to make the models animatable.

How can you animate 3D characters?

Movements have been repeatedly mentioned, but only two of the methods analysed (2D billboards and volumetric video) capture the movements directly from the original person. You might be wondering “How do I digitally animate avatars, my own 3D-designed characters or my 3D scans?” In broad terms, this animation can fall into two categories:

• Artificial animation: movements that have been designed or programmed by a human.

!A human created for a VR operator training simulator and artificially animated ([Source)](assets/blog/How-to-bring-a-3D-human-hologram-in-your-next-immersive-project--9.webp)

2. Motion capture (mo-cap): movements that have been extracted from real people.

Watch video →

Moving is a human art — our movements are part of what makes us unique. Hence, we are very sensitive to unnatural movements in digital characters. Artificial animation can be very affordable, but it usually portrays human movements and emotions poorly. In contrast, mo-cap solutions are, logically, a much better choice since we are capturing and superimposing real movements — but that comes at a cost: a high-quality mo-cap setup costs on its own more than a volumetric capture setup.

The most important thing is to assess the needs of your project. If fidelity and immersiveness are unimportant in your project, you may happily opt for artificial movements. Additionally, the quality of the 3D model and the quality of its movements need to go hand-in-hand. While a cartoon-ish design will work well with simple movements, a realistic 3D design needs great motion fidelity to avoid falling in the uncanny valley. Even mo-cap may fail if the level of the production is very high. For example, while it looked great with Gollum and Davy Jones (and we all cried with the 5-min life of Ellie and Carl), it was very creepy with Tom Hanks in The Polar Express — here’s what CNN had to say about it:

“To quote an old cliche, the eyes are the windows to the soul — so these characters look soul dead. When the characters are experiencing extreme emotions, such as fear or surprise, the animation seems to work. But when the characters are still — and processing information from each other — they look lifeless.” (Source)

All in all, if your project is compatible with solutions that do not require animation, like volumetric video, these solutions are the best way to ensure very natural and high-end human movements for the most immersive results. Otherwise, if you depend on animation and you have the budget, go for mo-cap. Even most importantly, don’t forget that regardless of your technological choices, the ultimate factor to the creation of compelling and immersive content is your own creativity!

“Computers don’t create computer animation any more than a pencil creates pencil animation. What creates computer animation is the artist.”

John Lasseter, Pixar co-founder and former Disney Chief creative officer

Still confused? Here’s one thing to keep in mind.

Choosing the right method to create 3D humans is important and sometimes a lengthy process. The considerations above can help guide your decision making as you design your next AR/VR project. You want to make sure you choose the right method for the content, as the right immersive experience can be instrumental in building your credibility and driving more clients and AR/VR projects.

If you are interested in bringing humans to your next immersive projects using volumetric video, get in touch with us! And don’t forget to check out ourTwitter to discover more exciting work by us and stay updated.

We’re thrilled to be an Epic MegaGrants recipient. Epic Games has committed $100 million to support game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing amazing things with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.

We look forward to making our volumetric video technology fully compatible with Unreal Engine, which is disrupting filmmaking with technologies as groundbreaking as virtual production, and which we believe has the potential to become the go-to platform for professionals to develop their immersive applications.

As experts in volumetric video, we are very excited to explore the full potential of Unreal Engine, and about the possibilities of UE5, which will be able to render even more photorealistic volograms in real-time. This grant will help us get one step closer to our mission of bringing reality capture closer to everyone.

Engage your key customers by bringing real actors into XR experiences!

We helped Virtual Voyagers provide their client with a VR experience like never before using our volumetric reconstruction technology. Here’s how we did it and why you should consider bringing real humans in your next immersive project!

Explaining a complex concept in an engaging and immersive way

The leading renewable energy company, ACCIONA reached out to Virtual Voyagers with a clear idea in mind: they wanted to showcase their complex installations and energy products in a simple manner so that their key clients felt really engaged. Together, they decided that the energy itself, the source and core of ACCIONA’s innovation, should guide the experience, and to make it engaging, they thought a human shape for it: LUX. We helped join the dots by enabling them to bring a real actor into their VR experience. The result? An exciting and engaging tour, complete with LUX, the embodiment of Energy, serving as your virtual tour guide:

Watch video →

Volograms: An affordable, high-quality Volumetric capture solution

Firstly, if you haven’t noticed already, capturing real people in 3D is getting increasingly popular. Why, you ask? Well, capturing humans from reality, as opposed to artificially synthesising or animating them, achieves way more natural and immersive results without falling into the Uncanny Valley altogether.

“We are including volumetric characters in our project proposals, because it allows us to take immersion to the next step” — Edgar, Virtual Voyagers CEO and Co Founder

At Volograms, our mission is to bring reality capture closer to everyone by enabling the creation of volumetric videos using simple, affordable setups, instead of having to travel overseas to a high-end capture studio. Only 12 cameras were used to capture LUX and as you saw in the video above, the results were pretty amazing.

Our state-of-the-art reconstruction technology enabled Virtual Voyagers to deliver this fully customised and branded experience. Thanks to this, ACCIONA has a unique and innovative tool to take their key customers on a memorable journey around their world-class installations. They also featured LUX at RE-Source Amsterdam last year, to introduce their corporate offers in VR.

Using VR to give your users the best experience

Imagine reading printed text about complex energy installations and products or even watching a plain video about these complicated installations. Boring and difficult, right? Now imagine putting on those Oculus Quests and being transported to this virtual world: the ACCIONA universe, with a cool tour guide who walks you through this incredible experience all along!

With VR, users can be teleported to remote places and they can be shown interactive models that can explain complex concepts in a simple gamified way.

Happy Clients = Happy Us!

“We love Volograms’ Quality and Agility… success is a guarantee, while being affordable and time-bound. The approachable team, and their care and commitment make Volograms the best partner for volumetric capture projects. Volumetric video is the next immersive frontier and we are excited to walk this path together with Volograms”

-Virtual Voyagers

You can also read about:

• Our AR version of Samuel Beckett’s Play

• Using ‘volograms’ in your corporate presentations

• How we brought Jonathan Swift to life for his 350th birthday

If you are interested in bringing volograms to your immersive projects, get in touch with us! We will be happy to help! And don’t forget to check out our Twitter to discover more exciting work by us and stay updated :)

The Volograms Team

We are happy to announce that we have joined the NVIDIA Inception Program as a community member.

NVIDIA’s Inception program is a virtual accelerator program that helps startups during critical stages of product development, prototyping and deployment. Every Inception member gets a custom set of ongoing benefits, from NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute (DLI) credits, marketing support and hardware technology discounts enabling early-stage startups with fundamental tools to help them grow. As an early stage startup that transforms ordinary videos into volumetric holograms using deep learning, we look forward to receiving NVIDIA’s technical expertise, resources and market support.

Our mission at Volograms is to bring reality capture closer to everyone, and we believe that this partnership with NVIDIA will help us get closer to achieving this mission.

Coolest Immersive Announcements at CES 2020

Consumer Electronics Show or CES 2020, the world’s largest technology conference took place last week from the 7th to the 10th. We were happy to learn that like last year, there has been an impressive collection of AR, VR and MR technologies on display, among other innovative and bizarre things… from faux pork to Mercedes’ avatar themed car!

Thanks to advances in 5G and AI technologies, Volumetric Videos have immense potential, as demonstrated by tech giants Sony and Intel:

Sony not only unveiled its electric car concept, Vision-S, with its 33 sensors and 360 Reality Audio, which gained everyone’s attention, but they showcased their new Eye-sensing Light Field Display, perfect for showing Volumetric content. The Sony booth also featured a Virtual Production set, captured as photo-realistic Volumetric data. Virtual production allows the viewer to experience the scene as if they are really there, and provides creative flexibility where film production can take place at any time.

Watch video →

Intel demonstrated software that can replace multiple cameras at sporting events, with high-quality, cloud-based, streaming Volumetric Video at 30 frames per second. Intel said it was now working on improving quality and increasing the factor of viewing a single player from 20 yards to six yards. Volumetric video is transforming the sports-viewing experience by enabling viewing without limitations.

Along with the usual MR glasses to LED displays and VR headsets, Mixed reality itself was used to enable people to experience new innovations. Here’s a list of Volograms’ favourite immersive tech announcements at CES 2020:

Through the Looking Glass!

Our friends from Looking Glass Factory stole the show with their immersive 8K display. With this new device, they take their technology to the next level: big format 3D effect without any headsets or glasses, you heard us right! Delivering 33.2 million pixels with over a billion-count color gamut at 60 Hz, it can be viewed by multiple people in the room.

Controlling devices with your minds is no longer science fiction!

Finnish company, NextMind demonstrated a wearable brain-computer interface that lets you control computer commands with your mind. It can fit on the back of a cap, headband or VR headset and decode brain waves in the user’s visual cortex to determine which option on the screen the user is selecting. NextMind CEO Sid Kouider calls it the “next frontier of human-computer interaction, with endless applications”.

VR headsets with crystal clarity for professionals!

Czech company, VRgineers demonstrated it’s latest 8K UltraWide XTAL headset that has dual 4K LCD displays instead of OLED. With its 8K resolution visuals (4K display per eye), the new headset has improved lenses, foveated rendering, and video passthrough, and its two Leap Motion sensors enable eye-tracking and gesture control. Priced at $7890, the XTAL is intended for specialized applications in industries including the air force, defense and automotive. The first receiver of the new XTAL will be the Vance Airforce Base in Oklahoma, which ordered XTAL headsets to upgrade their training center.

Nreal’s unreal AR glasses!

Chinese startup, Nreal’s AR glasses superimpose computer graphics over real-world views, in other words, you can pin your phone’s regular Android apps in your physical environment. Priced at $499, the glasses are portable and affordable, and what’s more- the headsets are set up even for prescription glasses. The glasses require a tethered connection to an Android phone and come with their own touch pad controller. Although the images produced by the device’s two displays, one for each eye do not fully cover the 135 degree horizontal field of view available to humans, they offer a crisp resolution of 1080p.

Speaking of glasses, Panasonic’s Ultra HD VR glasses are also worth mentioning. This Japanese electronics corporation unveiled world’s first ultra HD 3DoF VR glasses that are lightweight and offer truly natural in-headset visuals with minimal hardware. These glasses, used in combination with 5G connectivity use a micro OLED panel and new optical driver, eliminating the ‘screen-door’ effect.

LED displays that are smaller than a penny!

China-based, Jade Bird Display showcased its portfolio of bright, pixel-dense micro LED displays, one such minuscule display had a brightness of 3 million Nits (for reference, the iPhone 11 display is rated at 625 nits). Currently, the displays are monochromatic with 256 color levels, but they could disrupt the design of AR and headsets because of their extreme brightness, which in turn helps reduce transparency greatly, which is an optical design constraint.

We also loved how Hyundai provided its booth visitors a ride experience of its S-A1 Flying Taxi that was suspended in the air, with eight Pimax widescreen VR headsets!

The CES 2020 proved to be a great exhibition of the latest AR and VR technologies, for both consumer and enterprise applications. As a Volumetric Video enabler, we are super excited with all the developments taking place in this field, as this implies abundant opportunities for us to make Volumetric Video mainstream!

If you are interested in bringing volograms to your immersive project, get in touch with us! We will be happy to help!

The Volograms Team

Bringing Beckett to life!

At Volograms, we love blurring the lines between virtual and real. In pursuit of this goal, we present Augmented Play, a reinterpretation of Samuel Beckett’s famous 1963 text, Play, in collaboration with V-SENSE, the visual computing research group at Trinity College Dublin, and the Trinity Centre for Beckett Studies.

As a tech startup, we love balancing tech with art and culture. This project is exactly that, as said by Prof. Aljosa Smolic, an exploration of the interplay between cutting-edge technology and creative art. When was the last time you took out time to read a classic or go to a theatre? Augmented Play was developed with a view to engaging 21st century viewership, tech savvy people that access content increasingly via immersive technologies. This collaborative project pushes the limits in consumable video and film by harnessing new digital interactive technologies, in a way that makes us believe that this version would be highly approved by Samuel Beckett, who was quite the innovator himself.

In our reimagination of Play, we have assigned the role of interrogator to You, the viewer. You’re not only in the same virtual space as the actors, but you are also able to walk around freely and control how the play proceeds - the actors speak when activated by your gaze and are silent when you are not looking at them!

As you only see the actors’ heads in this play, we didn’t need a very fancy setup to capture them. Instead, we gathered five DSLRs and an improvised green screen and captured the actors inside the urn they normally use in the theatre so the environment was as familiar as possible for them. As you can see in the photo above, the director of the play, Nicholas Johnson, was able to give them instructions perfectly well.

We used our volumetric reconstruction algorithms to create the volograms of the actors using just these five standard videos. The environment with the urns and the spatial audio was created using Unity, and the final app was built for the Magic Leap One, the best headset in the market for these mixed reality experiences.

With this project, we aim to demonstrate that the use of volumetric video in these type of productions is not only feasible but also accessible - sophisticated immersive content is not available exclusively for deep pockets! Further, we intend to address the question of narrative progression in an immersive environment, which is a key concern in the creative culture sector. We are adopting computer game principles to storytelling, creating a non-linear narrative, resulting in an experience of active immersion instead of passive observation. We are placing the viewer at the centre of the storytelling process, empowering them to explore, discover and decode the story.

The text has been interpreted previously for webcast (Intermedial Play) and Virtual Reality (Virtual Play), and this AR interpretation of the Play is the final part of the trilogy, which was a two-year-practice-based research. We are grateful to V-SENSE and, of course, the Trinity Drama Department, to give us the opportunity of participating in a project as amazing as this one.

“What was most impressive was the detail of the actors’ faces, allowing the viewer to walk up close and around the urns in 360 degrees, seeing Play in a way it has never been experienced before.” — The Irish Times

We would also like to thank Magic Leap, for supporting the event where we showed Augmented Play to the public and lending us an extra device. The event was a great success and was even picked up by The Irish Times.

Immersive works are finding their way into art festivals today, and, at Volograms, we believe that more-accessible reality capture can greatly support that movement (hey, we’re here to make that happen!) We have to agree with Prof. Smolic again: AR glasses will be in a couple of years what mobile phones are today.

If you are interested in bringing volograms to your immersive project, get in touch with us! We will be happy to help!

The Volograms Team

We’re back!

Hello everyone! After a whirlwind of traveling, events, and networking, we are back from SIGGRAPH!

We’d like to take a quick moment to thank those who made our first SIGGRAPH as exhibitors a success. First off, we’d really like to thank all of you that visited our booth and met with us. We really appreciate the impressive turnout and all your interest, feedback, and questions. We look forward to continuing such great conversations and get our volograms to support your amazing creative projects! Thanks to our friends at Looking Glass, Magic Leap and Unity for providing the best platforms to showcase our work and to spark the best conversations.

It was great to share the Garage space with really innovative companies like DGG (super efficient 3D workflows), Extality (spot-on XR for the enterprise), Apelab (XR content creation for all), and Glassbox (real-time virtual productions), to name a few. Thanks, SIGGRAPH, for giving us all such exposure — these startups are making the future happen today!

We got the chance to experience very cool volumetric video demos in the Intel booth where they were showing the capabilities of their massive volumetric studio, a 10,000 square-feet dome with dozens of cameras. These demos included a VR experience featuring Reggie Watts, and a Grease musical performance including 20 volumetric dancers in AR on an iPad.

Unity, Unreal, NVIDIA, and Foundry also hosted some wonderful events and networking opportunities, and you can check out some of the highlights by following the links. A big highlight for us was the activity run by Enterprise Ireland that showcased the work of wonderful, groundbreaking Irish companies like Artomatix, VRAI, Piranha Bar, Jam Media, Cartoon Saloon, and Algorithm, alongside us!

We got the chance to experience some really interesting panels, too. Of course, we were thrilled to see two sessions focused on volumetric video. They were outstanding opportunities to bring together the extraordinary talent behind the technologies and the creations in the field. All in all, SIGGRAPH was a fantastic experience. We will be back in California, so see you all soon!

If you are interested in bringing your VR & AR experiences to the next level, get in touch with us! We will be happy to help!

The Volograms Team

We’re going to SIGGRAPH!

In just over a week, we will be leaving Ireland to attend SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles for the first time as exhibitors! SIGGRAPH is the world’s largest conference and showcase of computer graphics and interactive technologies, and takes place this year from the 28th of July through the 1st of August.

As a startup, we get the unique opportunity to present in an area called the Garage. As Apple, HP, and Google all started in the garage of their founders, SIGGRAPH reinvents that space specifically for startups and small companies, enabling them to demonstrate their technologies on a larger scale.

At our booth, we’ll be providing some really immersive experiences as exhibitors. We’ll be showing demos of different volograms on different platforms, including the Looking Glass and Magic Leap One!

SIGGRAPH hosts many events that we can get the chance to experience, including state-of-the-art scientific research, presentations, and panels with leaders in the field of computer graphics, immersive technologies, and also volumetric video capture. The conference also provides many opportunities to connect with other VR, AR, and new media companies and those interested in our technology.

We will be taking part in a networking event hosted by Enterprise Ireland, bringing together innovative Irish companies taking part in SIGGRAPH and giving those in attendance an opportunity to meet us!

If you’d like to meet with us at the conference or while we are in California (we will be in San Francisco the week after as well), feel free to register for the Enterprise Ireland event here, or get in touch with us! We’d love to meet you!

The Volograms Team

Augmented Reality is the next audio-guide

Museums and other cultural locations have relied on different technologies to improve the experience of their visitors for years. What started as a text sign explaining a piece or its historical context, soon evolved into interactive screens with videos, games and even quizzes that create an even more engaging experience and attract more visitors. Similarly, while audio-guides provided basic information and context, nowadays voice actors and other performances bring the experience to a more engaging level. With augmented reality (AR) at our doorstep and the number of AR-enabled devices increasing every day, it is only a matter of time before we start seeing exciting AR experiences in museums. Wired magazine wrote a very interesting article exactly about this.

For example, we captured actor Neill Fleming who played Sir Frederick Hamilton, a Scottish nobleman and soldier who built Manorhamilton Castle in Leitrim, Ireland. The resulting vologram can be easily experienced either using an AR headset or any AR-enabled mobile device. This character is being used for a Tourism AR app for the castle and is produced by Virtual Reality Ireland’s Terry Madigan, Camille Donegan and written by Sorcha Hegarty. The Virtual Reality Ireland team are convinced that volumetric capture of actors is, and will continue to be, a key component in storytelling for VR and AR.

We also worked in a very interesting project (lead by V-SENSE and the Library of Trinity College Dublin) for the 350th birthday of Jonathan Swift, a famous Irish author and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. In the project, we were inspired to create a brief narrative and concept that would augment the visitor experience through an AR or a VR application. The user is guided through the Long Room by a friendly vologram of the great Jonathan Swift. For the VR version, we captured a section of Trinity’s Library where the bust of Jonathan Swift is located, and augmented it with the vologram. In the AR app, you can walk through the Library and see Jonathan Swift appearing next to his own statue.

These cultural experiences are among our favourite applications of augmented reality, as they have huge impact and potential. If you are interested in bringing volograms to your museum, cultural site or exhibition, get in touch with us! We will be happy to help!

The Volograms Team

Taking keynotes to the next level: presenting events as a “vologram”

In 2012, deceased artist Tupac Shakur performed onstage during Coachella festival as a hologram, shocking not only festival attendees, but also the rest of the world. To create this illusion, a vast projector and mirror system had to be installed on the stage. Also, a Tupac lookalike was previously captured in front of a green screen, and his face was digitally edited to match the facial features of the rapper. This same effect has been repeated since then in many other live performances, and even ABBA has announced a worldwide hologram tour!

Last Wednesday, a vologram of Patrick Prendergast, the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, introduced this year’s Trinity Business and Technology Forum. However, the technology behind this presentation is completely different than the one used in the performances mentioned above. You can see his introduction in the video below:

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The key feature of this presentation is that the Provost is shown as a vologram that can be seen from any viewpoint, even walk behind him. This enables a lot more new creative possibilities. To create this vologram, we captured the Provost in our green-screen studio and reconstructed a volumetric video sequence using our technology. The vologram is rendered on the Microsoft Hololens and streamed live to a PC, connected to the main projector, so there is no need for complex mirror systems.

Even though the Hololens made the demo look even more futuristic, our volograms can be displayed in almost any VR or AR enabled device, making it even easier to share and enjoy the content. A good example of that is how the Provost “repeated” his presentation next to our booth at the event, this time using an iPad and ARKit.

It was very exciting to show our technology to a big audience in a live augmented reality demo and we are really looking forward to the next event featuring a vologram presenter. With our technology, creating these experiences is available for anyone.

If you are interested, get in touch with us!

The Volograms Team

Volumetric video and the future of digital communications

It was not so long ago when virtual reality was almost science fiction. The Oculus Rift changed everything when it broke the Kickstarter crowdfunding record back in 2012. Nowadays, we could say that VR has almost reached the status of “mature” tech, with VR experiences and applications becoming increasingly interesting, engaging and immersive, every day. Now, augmented reality seems to be the tech which will change our lives, by re-defining the way we interact with digital media and the world around us. However, in order for this to happen, we need more ways to capture real-world content, suitable for VR & AR, which help blur the lines between virtual and real.

At Volograms, we believe that volumetric video (also known as 4D video) is the technology which will provide tools and content for the next generation of VR & AR experiences. We believe that volumetric video will shape the way we communicate and express ourselves in the future.

To capture high-quality volumetric video of a human performance you can either use multi-view camera setup or a set of depth sensors arranged to cover the performer from as many view points as possible. The reconstruction process uses computer vision algorithms to produce a set of 3D models that are arranged as a sequence, at least at 30 frames per second. These models are normally 3D meshes with their corresponding texture images, or very dense colored point clouds. As you can imagine, 30 meshes or point clouds per second can result in a massive amount of information, so encoding and compression play a very important role.

One of our objectives at Volograms is making this technology available for as many people and platforms as possible, so we have been working to integrate our volumetric video sequences (our volograms) on every platform; our volograms can be experienced in almost any VR headset, and we have also integrated it in some of the most popular AR headsets — hopefully we will get to try it on a Magic Leap One soon! Also, to bring it closer to consumers, we can adapt our volograms to be experienced in mobile AR applications, both in iOS and Android.

We have also explored other platforms with more restrictions on file size by introducing some tradeoffs with image resolution and polygonal mesh density. The most challenging was creating a Snapchat lens and making it publicly available (scan the code above!), as these lenses need be under 4MB!

Lastly, we are happy to work with new devices and platforms. For example, a few weeks ago, our friends from The Looking Glass Factory released their holographic display on Kickstarter (one of the coolest deviced we have seen in a long time!), so we worked with them to integrate one of our sequences. Isn’t it cool?

Volumetric video is a very exciting field with innumerable applications. If you want to know more about the field, or if you are interested in working with us, Give us a shout!

The Volograms Team

Volograms is here!

After a few months operating in stealth mode, we announce that Volograms is finally a reality. As some of you may already know, Volograms is a spin-out from Trinity College Dublin on a mission to bring reality capture closer to everyone. Our technology uses a set of videos taken from different viewpoints and transforms them into volumetric holograms, volograms, that can be enjoyed in virtual and augmented reality. And the best part is that our system works with different camera configurations, outdoor or indoor scenarios, and can even generate content with videos captured with handheld consumer devices.

We believe that AR is going to take over the world (experts are calling it “the next computing platform”!), however, there is a content gap that is slowing it down. For AR to become really mainstream we need, firstly, more tools to create content and, secondly, this content to be more personal and realistic. We think that volumetric video could shape the way we communicate in the future, and it is our mission to bring tools to create 3D dynamic photo-realistic content closer to everyone.

Volograms is the result of almost two years of research within the School of Computer Science and Statistics of Trinity College Dublin in the fields of Free-viewpoint Video, Computer Vision and Computer Graphics. We spun out as an Enterprise Ireland High Potential Startup by Rafa Pagés, Jan Ondřej and Konstantinos Amplianitis, postdoctoral researchers with extensive experience and very diverse backgrounds both in academia and industry, including companies such as Disney Research and Siemens. The founding team worked together at V-SENSE, a research group funded by the Science Foundation of Ireland and led by SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies Aljosa Smolic, who will continue to be involved in the company as Scientific Advisor.

We take this opportunity to announce that Atlantic Bridge’s University Bridge Fund is leading our seed round. Following this investment, Chris Horn, Atlantic Bridge Venture Partner, will join our board. Also, Paul Sweeney, VP & GM of DAQRI International, the world’s leading professional-grade augmented reality company, will join our board. We are very excited to work with Chris, Paul, and the rest of the team; we are sure they will help us with our mission.

So if you are interested in bringing your VR & AR experiences to the next level, get in touch with us! We will be happy to help!

Join us on our quest and visit our website for more!

The Volograms team.