In a UK first, a group of companies and academic institutes has successfully completed a real-time virtual production experiment that used 5G mobile technology to place two actors in a scene though they were actually physically 280 miles apart.
The full list of participants in the trial, which is funded by the Scottish Government through the Tay Cities Region Deal and is supported by Dundee City Council
- Abertay University, Dundee, where the testbed is hosted
- InGAME (Innovation for Games and Media Enterprise)
- VSS (Video Screen Services)
- StoryFutures
- Royal Holloway, University of London
- The Scotland 5G Centre
- telecoms infrastructure company AWTG.
For the experiment, a large LED screen, part of which was previously used to film The Batman, was installed by VSS in Abertay’s new Virtual Production Research Environment in Dundee and was linked via 5G by AWTG, to a similar screen in Manchester.
The Tay5G Virtual Production project test sequence was directed by Professor Peter Richardson, head of virtual production at StoryFutures and professor of creative industries at Royal Holloway.
“From a directing perspective, we had a team up in Dundee and a team down in Manchester where I was physically based, and I would give the actors direction over the 5G network, as well as receiving a direct feed from the camera in Dundee.
I could see both shots on my monitor and the two actors that are 280 miles away acting together as though they were there in the same room. It’s been an interesting journey and we managed to get some really great material, so when the shots are compiled together you really do believe the actors are side by side, face to face.”
Peter Richardson
Source: FutureScot