News
News & Events
Great Interview of our Project Coordinator at Stereopsia EUROPE!
Our Project Coordinator Prof. Marc Christie from the University of Rennes 1 giving a great interview at Stereopsia EUROPE!
The Horizon 2020 project INVICTUS has come to an end!
The Horizon 2020 project INVICTUS – Innovative Volumetric Capture and Editing Tools for Ubiquitous Storytelling – has come to an end! The project worth more than 2 million euros brought together Université de Rennes and InterDigital from Rennes, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI from Berlin, Volograms from Dublin and a collaborating partner Dada ! Animation, a 3D real-time animation studio from Paris. Over the last two years, INVICTUS has worked to transform the media industry by offering new volumetric capture techniques and innovative and groundbreaking editing tools. It has delivered dozens of scientific publications, novel deep-learning driven pipelines for volumetric capture and animation, as well as innovative tools available to the community:
Volu: an iOS application that allows anyone with a mobile device to capture, play and share volograms!
VRtist tool: an open source VR design tool dedicated the creation of 3D environments and animations for rapidly prototyping scenes and shots.
Gepeto tool: a tool for capturing and editing high-fidelity avatars.
INVICTUS has unlocked opportunities in the European market for more compelling, immersive and customized virtual experiences at the intersection of film and games by fully leveraging recent volumetric motion capture technologies. To learn about the current developments in the industry and the INVICTUS novel results, we invite you to watch the short project movie.
Volograms attending a Foundry event at Google Dublin EU HQ!
We attended Stereopsia 2022!
Our third newsletter is out!
UR1 performed a number of user experiments with expert animators!
Experience sharing and forward-looking in XR EU funded projects
UR1 attended 3DV 2022!
Volograms at IBC 2022!
Our partner Volograms was invited to participate at this amazing session about Volumetric Video for Broadcasting, Metaverse Production and RT3D Assets together with other champions in this field, such as RTE, FOX Sports, Trinity College Dublin, and Unity!
HHI at IBC 2022!
Our partner HHI is presenting recent results from our project at IBC 2022 in Amsterdam in hall 8. Visit their booth and get familiar with animatable interactive volumetric video!
INVICTUS goes to South Korea!
Great reception of the work done with Inspiring Women as part of the INVICTUS Project at the Global Metaverse Conference in Busan. South Korea is among the top countries worldwide for volumetric video. What a privilege to receive their enthusiasm!
Hello Annecy International Animation Film Festival!
We were delighted to participate in the Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2022! It was exciting to learn about the latest innovations in the animation industry: the current tools that are being built on VR technologies and used for the production of animation movies. We were also very happy to demonstrate the INVICTUS open source VR tool for storytelling – VRtist – to key players in the animation industry! It was extremely valuable to hear their insightful feedback that can drive further development of the tool.
We attended FMX!
The INVICTUS project presented the most recent advances in volumetric capture and processing technologies at FMX 2022. Our researchers Marc Christie, Philippe Guillotel and Jan Ondřej demonstrated the impact of novel shape representations and motion retargeting techniques on 3D volumetric captured data using deep learning technologies. They also showed how these technologies could be exploited in Virtual and Augmented Reality applications to create more realistic and more interactive volumetric representations of characters. The video is available as part of the online program of FMX, until May 31, 2022.
We are at Laval Virtual 2022!
Université de Rennes I and INRIA are currently attending Laval Virtual 2022!
We are thrilled to take part in Laval Virtual 2022, an event dedicated to VR/AR and immersive technologies, and to interact with the major players in VR/AR in Europe! Our Project Coordinator Marc Christie and the researchers from Université de Rennes I and INRIA are currently presenting the latest INVICTUS EU Project results to the VR/AR community that also has a chance to discover and use our open sourced virtuality tool for storytelling: VRtist!
INVICTUS team is attending FMX!!
We are organising a workshop at FMX in Stuttgart to present our research on volumetric video to-date! Join us!
The Inspiring Women project produced by Volograms gets featured on Sky News!!
UR1 presenting INVICTUS to UNITY Employees!
The Project Coordinator Marc Christie, Associate Professor at the Université de Rennes 1, gave a talk on Computational Cinematography to Unity employees in February 2022 as part of a series of webinars called “Conversations with research pioneers”. Ongoing research as well as novel results from the EU project INVICTUS were introduced to the audience, that gathered more than 360 engineers, product designers, creatives, managers and research and development employees from one of the world’s leading platform for interactive 3D applications.
Volograms publish a paper on their volumetric video dataset
Volograms just released a paper on their volumetric video dataset.
The work from our partner Volograms to be used in schools to encourage young women to take up a STEM career!
Volograms performed a volumetric video capture to support the Inspiring Women project, a design-based research project being undertaken by Linda Cardiff as part of a Doctorate in Education at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland to encourage young women to take up a STEP career. The project is funded by Learnovate.
HHI receives best paper award
Congratulations to our partner Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI and their faculty member Decai Chen for receiving the best paper award at the IC3D conference for their work in the area of volumetric video and human body reconstruction!
Image: ©Fraunhofer HHI
Change of Project Coordinator
We would like to announce that starting from October 2021, the INVICTUS project is newly coordinated by the Université de Rennes 1 and Associate Professor Marc Christie. The Project Coordinator is responsible for the overall strategy and leadership of the INVICTUS project in consultation with the Executive Board and the Innovation Board. The Université de Rennes 1 and the project partners remain strongly committed to the successful implementation of the project by continuing to address the expected objectives based on the novel results already produced in the first year of the project. To learn more about the recent INVICTUS publications, our volumetric video datasets and technologies, as well as our virtual reality tool for storytelling VRtist, please explore the website.
Our partners INTERDIGITAL presented INVICTUS at the Technoférence37 Conference!
Very excited to have Philippe Guillotel from InterDigital, Inc. presenting the INVICTUS project at the Technoférence 37 – Digital in the credits of Arts and Cultures, organized by Images & Réseaux. The title of his presentation was: ‘Review of the research work in 3D reconstruction and volumetry undertaken within the framework of the H2020/INVICTUS project’ within the topic ‘More real avatars at the service of extended interactive experiences’.
Our partners HHI presented INVICTUS at the NEM Initiative Conference!
Our partners HHI presented INVICTUS at the NEM Initiative Summit, the international conference and exhibition, for all those interested in broad area of Media, Content, and Creativity.
Volumetric video datasets released by our partners Volograms are now available for download!
Our partners Volograms have released some volumetric video datasets that were used as test material for MPEG standardisation efforts. These datasets are part of the dissemination activities of the project and can be used for non-commercial purposes by the wider research community.
The Mixer project from our partner Ubisoft is now available on Github!
Ubisoft Animation Studio is proud to announce that we have open sourced Mixer, a Blender addon for real time collaboration in Blender. It allows multiple Blender users to work on the same scene at the same time. We believe this will help our collaboration with our partners on “INVICTUS”, a collaborative research project funded from the European Union’s “Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation” program. A series of videos presenting Mixer features is available here.
The VRtist project from our partner Ubisoft is now available on Github!
Ubisoft is proud to announce that we have open sourced VRtist, our virtual reality tool for storytelling. We believe this will help our collaboration with our partners on “INVICTUS”, a collaborative research project funded from the European Union’s “Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation” program. A series of videos presenting VRtist features is available here.
First volumetric video shoot by our partner Fraunhofer HHI at Volucap studio
On 16th April 2021, the Fraunhofer HHI team performed the 1st test shoot in the Volucap studio in Potsdam-Babelsberg. The objective of this shoot was to create test data for the research tasks in the project. We gratefully thank our two actors Sarah Von Chamier and Johnny Mondillo for their performance. Both were asked to act in various means, such as, facial expressions, body movements, but also dialogues. A total amount of 45 TB of raw data has been acquired. Based on these data, the consortium will further research and develop new algorithms to make volumetric video interactive.
INVICTUS is launched
We are proud to announce the launch of the “INVICTUS” collaborative research project that will receive funding from the European Union’s “Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation” program.
The “INVICTUS” project aims at delivering innovative authoring tools for the creation of a new generation of high-fidelity avatars and the integration of these avatars in narratives using novel collaborative VR authoring tools.
The project will be a collaboration with Ubisoft Film & Television Paris, Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute HHI, InterDigital Inc., Université de Rennes 1, and Volograms.
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