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Video games are one of the most relevant creative industries in Europe – encompassing almost 100,000 individuals.
The market is very interesting, but very competitive too, with an increasing demand of games that are bigger, better and with more realistic computer graphics.
Such qualitative and quantitative advancements in video games present many drawbacks for developers related to increasing costs, need of complex management systems, longer asset creation pipelines, etc.
These factors have direct negative consequences on the video games industry in Europe: they reduce the number of titles released, impede creativity involved, they stifle innovation and this may cause a financial overexposure of developers.
A project overview
Capture Reconstruct Play – is a name that combines the core elements of the CR-Play project.
The key idea is to create content (semi-)automatically, simply by using photographs or video, building on the emerging image based technology.
Game developers will be able to capture and reconstruct houses, buildings, trees, cars and other real life elements by first simply taking a few sequences of photos and videos which will then be processed by the semi-automatic software created in the project.
In CR-PLAY, we will expand and adapt technologies based on Image Based Modelling and Rendering (IBR) and Video Based Modelling and Rendering (VBR) which will serve as backbone technologies for the project.
Objective 1: Develop an innovative workflow and methodology for digital content creation in video game productions, reducing time and cost for the creation of realistic video games.
Objective 2: Provide novel, far-reaching solutions for easy capture of image and video-based content by:
- Developing novel mobile capture devices based on low-cost components, making image and video-based capture accessible to a much larger set of users (e.g., small games companies)
- Developing capture solutions which will be user-friendly, guiding the user in the capture process and allowing the capture of much richer data (e.g., reflectance and normals).
Objective 3: Significantly advance the state of the art in Image – and video-Based rendering by resolving major outstanding research problems, e.g.,:
- Allow high-quality results even in regions relatively far from the input cameras by overcoming artifacts due to missing image and depth information in the input.
- Allow the modification of illumination conditions in the captured photographs or video
- Allow the treatment of dynamic “backdrop” objects (such as trees moving in the wind, flames etc.) via VBR, which contribute greatly to the sense of realism.
Objective 4: Provide a comprehensive mixed pipeline which integrates Image and Video-based content with the traditional digital content creation pipeline.
Objective 5: Define and implement an evaluation framework that includes quantitative and qualitative methods for measuring efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction of developed methods and tools, involving both typical game developers and game players.
Objective 6: Provide a realistic plan for exploiting the results of CR-PLAY in the game developer community, tools developers to be integrated with the game creation technologies or complement current tools
Duration of the project
The project will last 36 months
Start date: November 1st 2013
End date: October 31st 2016