Virtual TV Studio

That was the first big project in my career. I was a member of a team working on the development of cost-effective, PC-based TV studio for Polish Television (TVP S.A.).

The world “virtual” meant that apart from presenters, the rest of the studio should be computer-generated. At first sight it does not sound too complicated – a simple blue/green box with artificially generated background, right? Not really – TVP wished that the camera (or cameras) could be moved during the recording which meant that the virtual camera observing artificial scenery should move exactly the same, to create a good illusion of the presenter being inside that scenery. That task was realized with real-time photogrammetric tracking of the real camera position (and orientation) with millimeter precision. The principle can be seen in the animation below (the quality of this animation gives some clues about the rendering capabilities of that time PCs…):

It does not sound much today that the whole studio should run on the PC, but in 2005, when Pentium 4 with 2GB RAM was the top-spec machine, it was quite a challenge. The reason for that was of course to minimize the costs of such a studio, possibly to the level which would be acceptable for small, niche channels which could be streamed over the Internet.

In this project, I was responsible for photogrammetric tracking of the recording camera and reconstruction of its parameters. I was also helping with some smaller tasks like developing a real-time image compression algorithm to allow for reduction of the data stream size, color optimization, blueboxing-algorithm etc.

During the incorporation phase, I had a chance to participate in recordings of various-type series in Polish TV, meet actors starring in the series popular at that time, see how the TV production looks from the backstage. That was a huge adventure! Sadly, I do not have much photos from that time…