ALIVE: live-action lightfields for immersive VR experiences

ALIVE is an eighteen-month industrial partnership between Foundry and Figment Productions together with University of Surrey and funded by InnovateUK. The collaboration aims to develop the technologies required to capture live-action content as a fully immersive Virtual Reality experience, where the viewer has the freedom to move inside the content.

ALIVE uses lightfield technologies to capture live-action performance from many viewpoints. The goal is to develop the data-processing techniques and post-production tools to prepare volumetric live-action elements from lightfield capture, and deliver the elements into a game engine for real-time rendering. The result is a truly immersive experience where the live action video content reproduces the parallax you see in the real world, a concept termed “Positional VR”.

These new technologies and artist tools are being tested and evaluated in a lightfield VR production. ALIVE is developing a cinematic live-action VR experience, “Kinch & The Double World”, which incorporates scenes where the viewer has the ability to lean-in and look around the content as if they were there.