NOVEMBER 30--The nonindustrial show area at VISION 2006 in Stuttgart, Germany, attracted a lot of attention this year. Point Grey Research (Vancouver, BC, Canada; www.ptgrey.com) hosted a special display featuring the use of its cameras by customer Digital Air (Zurich, Switzerland; www.digitalair.com) to record visual-effects sequences for the soon-to-be-released Tony Scott/Jerry Bruckheimer movie "DEJA VU."
Eighty Flea cameras were used to trigger Canon SLRs and simultaneously record an array of identical images for real-time playback of image sequences captured to film. Digital Air demonstrated how it used this system to record visual effects sequences for the movie. Digital Air also showed off its multiple-camera video recorder and player capable of controlling any number of DCAM-compliant 1394a or b cameras connected to a PC cluster. This system allowed the user to synchronize the starting and stopping of the cameras, change their parameters, and record or play back multicamera video sequences.
Visitors were also treated to a real-time shape-from-silhouette 3-D reconstruction system us-ing five Point Grey Flea cameras and a player tool that can easily manipulate, visualize, and compare sequences of multitextured geometries generated by the system. One or more sequences are loaded in memory and replayed simultaneously in real time.
The software controlling each of these systems was developed at INRIA, the cameras are from Point Grey Research, and the applications are being commercialized by Digital Air under its MOVIA mark (www.movia.com).
