I’m intrigued by Gaussian Splat videos because they have the potential to bring a person in front of you, as if he/she were really there. Combined with mixed reality, they can really make you feel like an idol of yours is there, at home with you. That’s why I was happy when, at AWE, I had the opportunity of speaking with Michael Mansouri, the CEO of Radiant Images, a company that has developed an innovative system to capture these kinds of videos. You can watch the full interview with him here:
What I loved about speaking with Michael, apart from his humour (he even stole from me the right to say the start sentence of the video!) and his passion, was discovering their portable system to record Gaussian Splat videos.
Recording Volumetric videos
Recording volumetric videos (either with splats or meshes) requires expensive capture rigs with many cameras. Usually you have to buy a warehouse, create this recording dome inside, and then you have to ask the people to be recorded to come to your place for the recordings.
Here you can see a video of a big recording venue that Microsoft built to create its video “holograms”:
Managing these spaces is expensive, and paying for the actors to come to your place adds additional expenses.
Radiant Images’ solution: a modular recording tower
Radiant Images innovates all of this by making these recording studios modular and transportable.
They don’t have a fixed dome of cameras. They propose some “columns” of iPhones that are recording units. Every unit is completely independent of the others, and this means you can choose how many of them you need: you can have more for more accurate and expensive captures, or you can have less for cheaper results.
Every unit completely runs on battery. There is a big battery powering both the iPhones installed on it and the light (useful to have better lighting of the actor to record). The battery has enough energy to power the system for a few hours. The fact that there is a battery means that there are no cables needed, so every column of cameras can be moved in a completely independent way. This makes the system fully modular and transportable. You don’t need to have electricity nearby; you don’t need a local server to analyze the data… You can just put these independent modules everywhere you want. Michael told me they can ship their recording system everywhere they want: it can fit inside some checked baggage.
This means that there is no need for the actor to come to your place. You can just ask Radiant Images to move their setup where the actor is, and then they can do the recording for you.
The advantage of using iPhones
Their recording units are not cameras, but are iPhones. There are various advantages in this solution. First of all, iPhones have amazing cameras, have LiDARs, and can record 4K videos at 60fps.
But iPhones are also powerful “computers”. This means that every iPhone not only can record the video, but can also pre-process the video locally. For instance, it can do the color grading, or can cut out some parts of the images that are not of interest for the final recording. This is huge because doing all this pre-processing locally spares the time and the money to transfer all the raw data to the server and then to do all the computation on the server.
The final advantage is that in case Radiant Images wants to do an upgrade of its system, it just needs to update the iPhones to their latest model and then can keep all the rest of the infrastructure untouched.
The final splat creation
Radiant Images is not the company making the final video, though. They do only the capturing of the data with the best quality possible. Then this data is given to other companies that can do what they want with it. This company has more than 20 years of existence, so it started when splats were not even a thing, and will keep doing the same job even when splats are old technology.
Talking about Splats, one of their partners is Gracia, a company I’m personally a big fan of. Radiant Images makes the capture, gives the data to Gracia, and Gracia creates a beautiful 4DGS (4-Dimensional Gaussian Splats) volumetric video out of it.
Costs
I asked how much all its work costs, and while I’ve not been told any public figures, I can tell you the price is definitely an enterprise one. These are captures for professional studios, not for amateurs. You pay for what you get: to have high-quality Gaussian Splat videos, you have to pay the right amount of money.
Final impressions
I came out deeply impressed by the work of Radiant Images: they created a system that makes the shooting of volumetric videos modular and efficient. In the booth, they also let people do some volumetric recording on the fly, so I can confirm the system works. Unfortunately, I couldn’t have my volumetric video because my friend Scott Stein “stole” the stage from me (Scott, offer me some chocolate cookies next time you meet me to repay me for this!), but I could see the capturing process working on him, and it was definitely good.
And then they are all nice people: the guys at the booth, starting from Michael, were all fun and passionate people, and I definitely appreciated that. I hope one day I can collaborate with this team and make some volumetric application together!