This week, Sony officially entered a partnership with GeniusXR and The Alan B. Levan NSU Broward Center of Innovation (Levan Center of Innovation), announcing a Volumetric Capture Studio for creating digital twins of real-world people and objects to suit a variety of enterprise needs.
The move enables the project partners to extend digital twin adoption and create new use cases for volumetric capture technology – including the XR content it produces. Each firm in the partnership seeks to innovate in XR and volumetric capture use cases for enterprise and industrial environments such as education, healthcare, and engineering.
The studio also accommodates training and onboarding sessions to teach professionals wishing to explore teh possiblity of digital twins, showcasing how a business can leverage the technology.
Azad Abbasi, the Founder & CEO of GeniusXR, added:
The Volumetric Capture Studio represents a significant leap forward in the world of immersive content creation. It opens up endless possibilities for creators and innovators across various industries. We’re dedicated to leveraging cutting-edge technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, to create immersive storytelling experiences in the metaverse. This partnership with the Alan B. Levan | NSU Broward Center of Innovation and Sony exemplifies our commitment to pushing the boundaries of Virtual and Augmented Reality.
John Wensveen, Ph.D, the Chief Innovation Officer of Nova Southeastern University and Executive Director of the Levan Center of Innovation, noted that the partnership “embodies” a dedication to “fostering breakthrough ideation, technology, and entrepreneurship.”
Wensveen also noted:
This studio serves as a pilot for exploring the vast potential of volumetric technology, enabling us to create a talent skills pipeline, drive company formation, and contribute to job creation in the region.
Accelerating Digital Twin Content Creation
The studio advertises how its volumetric technology can significantly accelerate the production of digital twins. The firm explains how its content creation platform is ready for the influx of wearables due in 2024, including AR, VR, and MR devices.
Moreover, according to the Levan Center of Innovation, the studio can improve a range of enterprise use cases, explainng how marketing groups can create immersive customer experiences for higher sales outcomes and better training, leveraging digital twins of real-world equipment or training items.
The Levan Center of Innovation claims its facility can meet these goals based on a team of on-site experts and through the cameras and machine learning software technology it’s leveraging from Sony.
Anthony Guidry, a Product Manager from Sony Electronics, added:
We are thrilled to be a part of this groundbreaking project with the Levan Center of Innovation and GeniusXR. VCS is a testament to our dedication to pushing the boundaries of technology and creativity, and this partnership allows us to expand the horizons of how this transformative technology can be used.
The Levan Center of Innovation Volumetric Capture Studio accurately captures its digital twin content via a series of 75 Sony RX0 II sensor ultra-compact 4Ki cameras and 70 lighting panels.
The studio also features a capture rig and Unity support, as well as capturing and rendering software that allows a team to work closely on all digital twin content creation stages– capturing, editing, delivery, and best practices.
Sony to Support Large-Scale Digital Twin Content Creation and Delivery
Sony’s recent partnership continues the firm’s journey in scaling the usability of digital twin content creation and delivery through new products and studios designed to encourage media and marketing groups to decrease production costs while retaining visual quality.
Last year, Sony introduced two volumetric and XR media production and learning institutions, Digital Media Production Centre, for industry professionals and students. The centres provide a learning space to help professionals leverage volumetric and virtual production tools to reduce prop and travel costs.
Sony brand of virtual production studios leverage digital twins of objects and places to create dynamic backgrounds which move according to an integrated camera’s tracking sensor. In May 2023, David Grey, Managing Director at Lux Machina and Claus Pfeifer, Head of Connected Content Acquisition at Sony, spoke with XR about how the new digital twin use case can improve profit gains for media professionals.
Claus Pfeifer noted that a professional can take a real object or prop, scan it and place it into a virtual world backdrop which matches the consistency of the colours a camera picks up, “the consistency of the quality of the capture between the real world and the virtual world is very important,” Pfeifer remarked.
Pfeifer added, “For them, it’s very important to move between the virtual and real world easily and quickly, and that’s what we are supporting.”
Moreover, David Grey explained how scanning objects and creating digital twins is a “difficult piece of the puzzle which isn’t spoken about often.”
He also remarked that anything Sony can do to make digital twin content creation and usage easier through improved access to scanning software/studios or digital marketplace will only “make it easier for more people to get hands on the technology.”
Grey also said:
I think when people start to take a much more holistic, virtual production approach, that’s where you’ll see the cost-benefit. We’re still in a world where people are used to making decisions as late in the process as possible – “fix it in post.” If you can spend a bit more time with your key [on-site] talent making those decisions, then even you only save, say, 5 percent, 10 percent on the production. That’s obviously a huge amount of money, but it will take people who want to commit to that workflow and see the benefit of it to get to that point.
Digital twins touch a number of professional markets, from factories to construction to media and advertising; understanding how each area adopts the hardware is critical to realising the more comprehensive usability of XR and how the tech will affect the bigger picture of the world.
Even Sony, which focuses on providing XR solutions to media groups, also dabbles in providing solutions for other clients in construction and beyond. Moreover, with other tech giants teased to enter the XR market this year, such as Samsung and Apple, the market may see an influx of established players ready to swoop in to claim a personal patch of land.
