Watching what companies like Sony Imageworks and DreamWorks Animation have been doing with technology originally developed for simulation and training and interactive immersive display rooms, InterSense has introduced the VCam, a virtual camera tracking system aimed primarily at feature-film animation and game-development.

InterSense has been working closely with customers in the media and entertainment markets ever since Sony Imageworks rigged a system that gave a handheld feel to shots in The Polar Express. “They had a way of moving a virtual camera in a virtual environment,” explains Dean Wormell, InterSense director of applications marketing. “We developed an interface to Kaydara Filmbox [now Autodesk MotionBuilder], and they put it on something they could move around in a real space to create a virtual camera move. That’s how the VCam technology started.”

The heart of the VCam, which was introduced at SIGGRAPH last year and began shipping earlier this year, is essentially a tracking device built into a generic Panasonic video camera body. The camera’s electronics are integrated with MotionBuilder so that the camera operator, looking into the viewfinder or watching the camera’s LCD display, can see a virtual environment in which the virtual camera’s position mirrors the real camera’s moves. Controls that would normally require a keyboard and mouse have been mapped to the camera’s buttons and lens controls.

“We added a joystick component to allow people to move themselves through the virtual environment,” Wormell says. “They can place themselves in different locations, scale up to the size of a giant, or make it look like they’re sitting in a helicopter flying overhead. You control all these things from the camera body without having to return to the keyboard, and that’s a big value-add.” Wormell says allowing those kinds of dramatic changes to be made in camera, rather than at a workstation, enables a real-time workflow that dramatically increases efficiency.

Recent projects using InterSense have included Monsters vs. Aliens. “They put one of our standard tracking devices on top of a display and put some handles on it so they could walk around the environment, feeding the data from our tracking system into their production software to get that live, interactive look and feel,” Wormell says. “Our real-time inertial components mimic human motion very effectively. It really looks like someone is shooting for real.” And Sony Entertainment recently used the camera to create cinematic sequences for Insomniac’s PlayStation 3 blockbuster Resistance 2.

Up next is a stereo workflow. Wormell says stereo production will be supported in MotionBuilder next year, allowing a virtual single-camera rig to be changed to a stereo rig in software, including control of spacing and toe-in. “We’ll change a couple of the controls on our VCam to control the depth and angle of stereo,” Wormell says. “The next thing we would add, potentially, is a consumer-style stereo head-mounted display or a stereo monitor.”

A turnkey “starter system” that allows a wired VCam to operate within a cube of space measuring three meters across starts at $49,500. Wireless is a $7000 option, and additional space requirements will increase the price. “We’ve done studios that were 50 feet by 30 feet in terms of tracking area, and we can actually go larger than that,” Wormell says, citing a 50-foot-by-50-foot installation at Brown University.

For more information: www.intersense.com