Progress of the Project
in
2019
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04. - 06. Dec 2018
ICT 2018
At this year's ICT: Imagine Digital - Connect Europe conference in Vienna, we were given the opportunity to present first.stage to the public. Within three days, we had the chance to exchange ideas and opinions with interested visitors at our booth. In addition to inspiring discussions, attendants could gather hands-on experience with the demonstrators and provided substantial feedback for the project team.
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07. and 08. Nov 2018
Technical Meeting
On the 07. and 08. of November, the project team arranged another technical meeting in Vienna at the premises of our partner Arx Anima. Within two very productive days, we discussed the results of the latest review and outlined further development steps for the future. Ultimately, the project team compiled a list of prioritized features and bug fixes to be addressed in the next six months.
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11. and 12. Sep 2018
Press Conference and Review
On the 11. and 12. of September we presented the first.stage second year results to the press and the reviewer at the Landestheater in Linz. The press conference resulted in a television report in ORF Oberösterreich heute, the most viewed news program in Oberösterreich, a radio feature in ORF Servus Oberösterreich, and a print article in the OÖ Nachrichten as well as in the österreichisches volksblatt. At the following Central Meeting plans for future activities were made.
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16. Aug 2018
Rokoko at SIGGRAPH2018
Our project partner Rokoko presented their Motion Capture Smartsuit at SIGGRAPH2018. For detail see their blog post.
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31. May 2018
Deliverables 2.2 and 3.2 Published
We published our second demonstrators for the Workpackage 2 and 3. All functions of the demonstrators can be reviewed in the accompanying video.
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31. May 2018
Requirements and Concepts Published
We published all our results from the Workpackage 1 on the requirements and core functions for a previs software from the perspective of the domains of film, animation, theater and VFX. In additon we published our concept for the natural user interface which is build upon the requirements from the previous deliverables. Read all about this interesting topic in our Deliverables section.
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23. May 2018
Evaluation Workshop
We had a two day workshop at our partner University of Bremen on the evaluation of our prototypes within the Workpackage 6. With our application partners we defined metrics and evaluation methods for the upcoming evaluation projects.
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26. April 2018
Presenting first.stage Results at CHI 2018
We presented the results of a user study with our first prototypes at the international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2018. We got a lot of positive feedback and some nice discussions at our poster.
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25. Apr 2018
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24. Apr 2018
VR Symposium at Ars Electronica
Frank Suttheimer from our project partner TOG (Landestheater Linz) presented the first.stage project in a motivational speech at the Virtual Reality symposium of the Oberösterreichische Zukunftsakademie (in cooperation with Ars Electronica)
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15. Mar 2018
Development Workshop
On the 14. and 15. of March our development team met with the application partners for a workshop, assessing the curent state of the prototypes and discuss future development. We had two very productive days full of dicussion and planning. The outcome is a development and evaluation roadmap for the next half year. We are looking forward to present you interesting new features in the near future.
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8. Mar 2018
Demonstrator Release 7
You can now capture performances with the RoKoKo Smartsuit. No need for a studio with an expensive camera rig for optical tracking, the Smartsuit uses inertial tracking to measure poses. And now you can stream live data straight from the suit into the first.stage software. Even small productions can now afford to include motion capture and computer-generated imagery.
Arx Anima is already testing the Smartsuit within their evaluation project.
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23. Feb 2018
Landestheater Linz testing the latest Prototype
Our project partner TOG (Landestheater Linz) is currently testing and evaluating our latest VR prototype. With their support we are constantly improving our software in terms of functionality and usability for the application area theater and stage production. Learn more about our partners and progress.
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19. Feb 2018
Empowering Creative People: Virtual Reality for Previsualization
Our paper: Empowering Creative People: Virtual Reality for Previsualization got accepted to the CHI Conference.
Previsualization (previs) is an essential phase in the design process of narrative media such as film, animation, and stage plays. Digital previs can involve complex technical tasks, e.g. 3D scene creation, animation and camera work, which require trained skills that are not available to all personnel involved in creative decisions for the production.
Read more about the paper -
15. Feb 2018
Prof. Rainer Malaka Presenting first.stage in India
Prof. Dr. Rainer Malaka of our Partner: University of Bremen presented our progress in first.stage at the National Institute of Technology Mizoram, India and on the Science Circle Lecture in the German House of Research and Innovation in New Delhi, India.
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31. Jan 2018
Review Meeting in Vienna
We just had our intermediate review meeting at the premises of YourMom in Vienna! We were happy to host two experts from digital media and HCI together with our EU project officer, presenting them what we have been working on the last 20 months. The day was filled with presentations and demonstrations where we presented our VR prototypes, Rokoko Suit integration in VR, multitouch demonstrators, and even our latest OptiTrack system. We received a lot of valuable feedback and will now continue with further development, dissemination and evaluation of our tools.
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23. Jan 2018
Arx Anima Testing the Newest Prototype
Our partner Arx Anima performed further test with the latest demonstrator release 6. They integrated some of the assets of their project Nebular which they will later use for evaluation within a complete production project. In the tests, camera and posing functions are tested. See two of the videos, documenting their tests above.
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22. Jan 2018
Demonstrator Release 6
Using the new “Through The Lens” camerawork, you can now place cameras on set and then precisely frame your shots: pan & tilt the camera simply by dragging the view; choose the lens from wide to telephoto; and even add dutch tilt (roll) if you want. Once your shots are framed, you can then set up camera moves between the shots and the camera will track between them as the scene plays out. You can also preview any camera from anywhere in the scene simply by looking at your wrist.
