Wild Capture's CEO Will Driscoll told about the new Digital Human Platform, shared how its toolkits can assist 3D artists, and revealed the way the company plans to monetize it.
Introduction
My name is Will Driscoll. I am the Chief Executive Officer of Wild Capture. I bring extensive experience as a digital human technologist delivering solutions for art directable live-action characters for visual effects, virtual production, spatial interactive media, and games. I co-founded Wild Capture to build the bridge between volumetric video and digital humans for robust media and tech production needs. In this role, I am chiefly responsible for the forecast and the insight of the practical trends in bringing photorealistic people to spatial technologies and offering customers the most modern and efficient volumetric capture solutions available to improve productivity.
With a background as a content creator, I’ve always been interested in adopting new technologies to enhance the creative process. I was an early adopter of stereoscopy, facial motion capture, LiDAR, photogrammetry, virtual reality, and now volumetric video and have enjoyed making technical contributions to each innovation.
Wild Capture
Wild Capture is advancing volumetric video technology that provides production and post-production studios a gateway to a live human character pipeline. We ease the complexities of the highly technical spatial media world to provide artists/creators with resources to use this technology across many industries.
Digital Human Platform
Wild Capture's Digital Human Platform offers a complete production pipeline that translates the human essence into volumetric video with the highest quality performance captures available to break the uncanny valley.
The Digital Human Platform is a bridge for artists, creators, or anyone wanting to use digital humans in spatial media. It is designed to save creators thousands of manual hours so that high-quality volumetric content could be used as optimum art at scale and give artists a way of outputting to their preferred render engines for final render.
Assisting 3D Artists
The Digital Human Platform is designed for artists, creators, or anyone wanting to use digital humans in spatial media. It is a collection of tools that automate processes and build bridges between different render engines, applications, and streaming media platforms.
The platform relies on the SideFX PDG procedural architecture and the Houdini software engine to open a gateway to common 3D editors as we continue to develop plugins to feed our volumetric capture data natively. Houdini provides a non-destructive workflow and proceduralism which allows us to provide agnostic support across proprietary and custom capture systems.
Cohort Crowd and Digital Fashion
Two highlights of our quickly expanding Digital Human Platform are the Cohort crowd and Digital Fashion tools. The toolkits were developed over the course of several years. Cohort is the new time-saving tool for volumetric assets used to create crowd assets for XR, virtual production, and web activations.
Based on varied pre-recorded Wild Capture volumetric performances, Cohort has various libraries of smart assets to choose from to produce lifelike crowd behaviors. It is deployable at scale across virtual production and gaming engines such as Unreal and Unity, software applications, and for VR and web-based needs.
The Digital Fashion application allows creators to apply CG fabric in 3D virtual spaces and solves the necessary volumetric character interaction to create lifelike realism.
Monetization
Wild Capture offers XR technologies and turnkey production services to create digital humans, volumetric crowds, and CG fashion for media production, metaverse, software, and web-based deliveries. Currently, Wild Capture is commercially servicing the Digital Human Platform using a "Product as Service" model.
As a partner in the XR Foundation's "Open Metaverse" initiative and co-developer of the Universal Volumetric (UVol) streaming media player, our guiding principle is to advance and democratize open-source technology in virtual world-building so that anyone interested can create digital humans.
We are working with other development, user, technical and educational communities to make sure our technologies are relevant and offer the spatial media community at large a high-quality product.
As we anticipate tremendous growth and interest in the volumetric video for the creation of digital humans, our team is gearing up for a training and education initiative to show users how Wild Capture products can be used to comport, customize, and deliver volumetric assets.
Future Plans
There are already technologies that exist for the mass adoption of digital humans as holograms, in the metaverse, and for virtual worlds of all kinds. Wild Capture middleware technology and services exist to bridge these gaps for the creators, artists, and the platforms they use.
Now that we have introduced the Digital Human Platform and our leadership team, our goal is to continue developing and offering market-ready tools that can be purchased directly from Wild Capture. Among the first will be a volumetric dailies app that will allow clients to upload volumetric data to receive shareable streaming URLs to their volumetric content.