A businessperson’s thoughts on Intel Studios shutting down
By: Nicolas Moreno De Palma
Tags: VR, Volumetric Video, AR, Intel, Business

An amazing idea…

If the concept of volumetric video makes most people daydream — recording what we see in 3D so that we can fully immerse in the content, — Intel Studios was the most ambitious attempt so far to bring the dream to life. Most volumetric studios focus on what the technology can do well today: recording one or two people in a relatively small space. This still leads to endless possibilities, mostly because simple shootings can be digitally combined into ambitious experiences using standard platforms like Unity and Unreal, e.g., bringing many actors shot in individual takes into one single AR or VR app. In contrast, Intel’s thinking was far more ambitious: forget the limitations, let’s build a full-size volumetric stage — one in which a whole film-scene can be shot at once. This would, for instance, enable the whole cast to act together, large items to be brought into the captures, even a horse to gallop across — see this amazing Western concept shot as an example.

Comparison of the Intel Studios (pic source: VRrOOm) with a normal-size volumetric video one

Hard to bring to life

In order to make such an idea possible, Intel had to deploy the best engineers and hardware available. I don’t even want to list here the number of high-end cameras, communication equipment and processing infrastructure that was used to power it. And I am sure all that was cheap compared with the total sum of salaries of their team: some of the most brilliant minds in the entire industry.

However, soon enough, the concept started to show its flaws. Many of us got suspicious when most press releases and public presentations were only speaking about the massive technology installation and potential of the idea, but not showing actual materials shot. The exception was the concept video linked above, which probably took more money to post-produce than it would have taken to be produced from normal video materials through standard VFX. Even ambitious projects (such as the Grease remake) were illustrated with nicely-shot behind-the-scenes dances and interviews, but little could be seen of the actual volumetric captures. The explanation is probably simple: quality was subpar. Volumetric video typically looks good when you have a number of cameras focusing most of their range of view on the human beings you want to turn into holograms — that’s a big challenge when your stage is gigantic. For reference, Microsoft uses 106 cameras to cover a volumetric capture area of around 50 sq ft (~5 sq m). I’m not the right person to calculate the proportional hardware and processing power that Intel would have needed for their 10,000 sq ft (~1,000 sq m), but I know they were very far from there. They continued to invest and recently published interesting work, but the results were still not at the right level.

To make a fair comparison of quality, I have taken three screenshots from videos of volumetric sequences in action: one from Intel Studios’ Grease, as seen in a very inspiring TED talk (left); my own vologram shot with 12 cameras (centre); and another capture powered by us using a 60-camera setup (right)

What was the business case for clients?

Quality was probably the least of their concerns anyway: how could those massive volumes of low-resolution 3D-data be used? Was this technique competitive vs established VFX ones for normal, 2D film productions? What was the ROI for immersive film-making with such a setup, given the current audience-sizes of XR films? Who has actually enjoyed that Grease experience, for example, besides curious visitors of specialised conferences?

Intel Studios was a brave R&D project, but an extremely expensive and hardly-feasible business undertaking as well. Intel Studios was a product without clear use-cases or clients. While the entire film industry was looking at more efficient and practical ways to shoot, with virtual productions at the forefront, Intel Studios grew giant to be compatible with good-old film-making. Please don’t get me wrong, this is only easy to see in hindsight —I was as excited about it as everyone else. Truly innovative companies need to think big, fail often, and rarely (but meaningfully) get it right and hit the jackpot.

Does this mean that volumetric video will never be able to work with stage-size productions? I don’t think so. It makes me think of the early days of photography, when companies travelled from town to town with those bulky cameras to take a few pictures that probably costed a fortune — would I have hired one of those companies to come to my kitchen and take a random picture of my half-cooked paella to share with my parents, as I do now with my smartphone camera? My take is that, in the same way photography was not ready for certain use-cases back then, volumetric video is not yet ready to shoot full-size film scenes directly on stage.

For me, Intel Studios was as unlikely to succeed among film-makers in 2018 as the cameras above among normal consumers in the 19th century — however: consumer cams eventually boomed! Pic source: Pinterest

Looking forward

While I loved the idea behind Intel Studios — and I still admire Intel’s innovative and entrepreneurial approach, deploying the resources to bring it to life — the business person in me can’t be sad that it didn’t work. It is simply normal. In fact, the business person in me admires Intel even more for having created the volumetric-video-based product that has scaled biggest so far: True View, an amazing solution to achieve the coolest replays in top sports around the world, on which Intel continues to focus. The business person in me is also excited and intrigued about the two new high-end volumetric video studios that Microsoft is powering (in the US East coast and Australia), the accessibility that Depthkit is enabling, the AI-algorithms that Tetavi is developing and the sustainability that long-term players like 4DViews are demonstrating, to name a few. Volumetric video is still in its infancy, but it is a healthy one, and technology waves do not need the same amount of time these days as they needed in the 19th century — we might see it becoming a beautiful young adult before we expect it.

For me, Intel Studios represents one of the amazing but ephemeral volumetric video’s milk teeth. A tooth that helped one of the most promising technological fields grow, but that it is now time to drop, to leave space for products that are prepared to scale and reach maturity. At Volograms, we are building products based on volumetric video that make sense from both the user and business perspectives, looking for accessibility and mass-use. We are already empowering XR studios around the world to shoot their own content with affordable setups and proven use-cases (see our posts on Marketing, Tourism and XR storytelling). Not stopping there, we are going beyond and want to make reality capture available to everyone, building an amazing company while doing so. Stay tuned for more!