October 18, 2018
IKINEMA and Unreal Engine empower Globo’s live AR World Cup heroes
Turning again to IKINEMA’s LiveAction technology and Unreal Engine (remember Rio Olympics 2016?), TV Globo shared the first-ever live broadcast of dynamic 3D mocap-driven football avatars viewed through AR lenses.
LiveAction is a cutting-edge, full-body solver which provided the Globo team with a reliable and robust real-time animation pipeline throughout their entire on-air coverage. As numerous actors performed together from an off-site studio location, their actions were captured, streamed via LiveAction and then rendered using Unreal Engine, all in real time.
“The beauty of LiveAction’s Animation Cleaning Pipeline (ACP) is how it automatically removes motion data imperfections on the go, and seamlessly matches that motion onto the virtual avatars during the livestream with zero latency on an extreme integration solution scenarium. This partnership gave us the chance to be innovative on air,” says Pablo Bioni, Globo Executive Supervisor of Technology. “The finished result was perfectly synchronised actors with their 3D rendered football stars interacting naturally with one another.”
In the below video, see how LiveAction streams the actors’ captured movements and seamlessly retargets their motion onto virtual characters, whilst being rendered in real time in the Unreal Engine viewport.
By harnessing IKINEMA’s LiveAction and Unreal Engine, Globo presenters were able to experience full immersion onset by seeing and interacting with multiple livestreamed virtual characters within the virtual football stadium, while the viewing audience simultaneously enjoyed the augmented TV experience.