Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the iconic film “Grease”, director Randal Kleiser and Diego Prilusky, Intel Studios’ general manager, revealed a teaser and first look at an immersive experience.
A partnership between Intel and Paramount Pictures, the immersive experience was unveiled at last week’s CES 2019 in Las Vegas.
In December, Kleiser and more than 20 dancers filmed a re-creation of one of the movie’s memorable musical numbers, “You’re the One That I Want”, at Intel Studios in Los Angeles.
Captured by the studio’s 96 high-definition 5K cameras, the dance scene will come alive in “volumetric” video, a format that enables the viewer to experience the content from any given point of view.
Intel Studios’ 10 000-square-foot-geodesic dome is the world’s largest immersive media hub. Moviemakers film scenes inside the dome from all directions at once, a technique called “volumetric capture”.
Data captured by each camera is shaped into voxels (think 3D pixels), which render the virtual environment in multi-perspective 3D. It allows audiences to view a scene from any angle – even the middle of the action.
“It’s exciting to be able to do something with this new cutting-edge technology,” Kleiser says.
Intel Studios sends captured volumetric content over five miles of fiber-optic cable to more than 90 Intel-powered servers that can crunch over 1Tb of data every 10 seconds. The studio’s servers will eventually store up to 10 Petabytes of data — the equivalent of 133 years of high-definition video.
“Volumetric video opens the door to entirely new kinds of visual storytelling,” says Diego Prilusky, GM of Intel Studios. “It lets moviemakers create lifelike immersive and interactive media experiences that simply haven’t been possible before.”
Intel and Paramount plan to release an immersive experience based on the full song “You’re the One That I Want” this year for PCs and virtual reality headsets.
