FascinatE - Format-Agnostic SCript-based INterAcTive Experience

FascinatE is a €9.5m EU funded project involving a group of partners from across Europe. FascinatE is looking at broadcasting live events to give the viewer a more interactive experience no matter what device they are using the view the broadcast.

The FascinatE project will develop a system to allow end-users to interactively view and navigate around an ultra-high resolution video panorama showing a live event, with the accompanying audio automatically changing to match the selected view. The output will be adapted to their particular kind of device, covering anything from a mobile handset to an immersive panoramic display. At the production side, this requires the development of new audio and video capture systems, and scripting systems to control the shot framing options presented to the viewer. Intelligent networks with processing components will be needed to repurpose the content to suit different device types and framing selections, and user terminals supporting innovative interaction methods will be needed to allow viewers to control and display the content.

To implement a system to achieve these aims requires a paradigm shift in video production, towards capturing a format-agnostic representation of the whole scene from a given viewpoint, rather than the view selected by a cameraman based on assumptions about the viewer’s screen size and interests. It should be noted that we are not proposing to capture a 3D representation of the scene, nor to support true ‘free viewpoint’ rendering. Such systems, in the experience of the project partners, will be incapable of presenting really high-quality images for the foreseeable future, so we are concentrating on an approach that will deliver true high-quality images, whilst allowing a significant degree of interactivity, and which is practical within the time frame of the project. 

By format-agnostic we mean that the resolution, field-of-view, aspect ratio, frame rate and colour depth of the captured image are chosen based on the requirements of the particular production, rather than being tailored to a particular delivery format. Indeed, there will be no single camera with a given set of parameters covering the scene; rather, different parts of the scene will be captured with different types of camera, clustered around one or more viewpoints.

The FascinatE Project consortium is made up from 11 partners from 11 institutions from across Europe:

• Alcatel-Lucent
  
• ARRI
• BBC
• Interactive Institute
• Fraunhofer – Heinrich Hertz Institute
• Joanneum Research
• University of Salford
• Softeco Sismat
• Technicolor
• The Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research
• Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya