The future of film making using Kinect and RGBD

 What happens when great technologies and creative minds combine together? we get some amazing and cool products!

As I said in my previous post, there are so many things we could do with gesture recognition using kinect or  Leap motion sensors. We have experienced its uses in so many fields already like, gaming, education, health, kids etc. Just imagine if we could use Kinect and its depth sensors as camera in film making. Last year researchers of RGBD Toolkit came up with a software that will let you do just that.

RGB+D Toolkit Overview from James George on Vimeo.

The RGBDToolkit is an experiment in a possible future of film making, where photographic data captured in 3-dimensions will allow for deciding camera angles after the fact, combining the languages of photography and data visualization. This hybrid computer graphics and video would allow for a storytelling medium at once imaginary and photo real. The RGBDToolkit is a software work flow for augmenting high definition video with 3D scans from a depth sensor, such as an Xbox Kinect, to create a hybrid video and computer graphics. First a recording application allows you to calibrate a high definition video camera to the depth sensor, allowing their data streams to be merged. Secondly a visualization application allows for viewing the combined footage and applying different 3D rendering styles, camera moves, and exporting sequences.

This software is a science fiction, a seed of a potential future functional just to the point of allowing a community, you, to share in imagining the possibilities.

“RGBD + Toolkit is a workflow for making volumetric video with a Kinect and a digital SLR”. Basically if you have a DSLR camera and an Xbox Kinect, it’s possible to get a crazy 3D metric mapping effect on video. The technology brings abstraction into digital video and has tons of potential as an artistic. It’s all open-source and the creators of the software are aiding in the education regarding setting yourself up and actually making films with the toolkit. They claim that there is less emphasis on the permanence of the software but rather the methodology behind it. Therefore the team at RGBD + Toolkit will continue to adapt and aid people in DSLR + Depth filmmaking.

There is so much potential in this type of filmmaking and the guys behind RGBD + Toolkit are only at the tip of the iceberg. The tune may not be the greatest, but this video by Jon Lindsay for his song entitled “Oceans more” uses the effect in a pretty cool video if you’ve never seen what the technology looks like in practice.

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