With the students of our VjAcademy, we visited the ISE exhibition on visual technology earlier this year. Here they discovered a crazy foto booth with dozens of cameras all around. Of course, the students couldn’t resist having their picture taken with this device. We left our mailadresses at the friendly Berlin staff and basicly forgot about it.
Mystery parcels
Weeks later, crazy pictures like this started filling our WhatsApp group. Moreover, our members were receiving mysterious parcels from Germany. Who created these awesome, highly detailed action figures of ourselves?
An instant 3D model of yourself
Off course, the ISE fellas were 
behind all this. They also sent us zip-files containing something even more awesome: the digital data that they used for the small statues. This is exactly what our students needed for their experiments and pranks. If you know what you’re doing, Cinema 4D software turns this data into virtual characters. This is way faster and more realistic than modeling a person from scratch, at least for medium sized projects (for blockbusters and major games, a lot more software and labour comes in).
Making it move
Our student Shurly (Henk) certainly does know what he’s doing. Apart from bending our virtual mini mees in impossible ways, and creating silly clone armies, he also gave the models rigging: a skeleton that alows the 3D models postures and movements.
On the technology
The German supplier of the action figures and the data is a company called Staramba. They fit 75-150 camera’s in a custom made 360 degrees photobooth. The cameras feed 18 MegaPixel images to a computer, to be stitched together for use as textures in e.g. Cinema 4D. Also a stereo model is generated that gives you the 3 dimensional shape. Their business is primarily creating sandstone figurines of celebrities and the likes as fan merchandise, and selling entire photobooths plus software to 3D companies.
Learning more
Technology to scan real stuf and create digital 3D characters is not new or unique, but it is evolving rapidly. A stunning case by ManvsMachine creating amazing 3D animals based on stuffed ones can be seen here . Also, there are several tools for smartphones like Trnio, Scann3D and the Google Tango product line.
check out this 
Shakespeare once said, “All the world is a stage.” We couldn’t agree more! Recently, our friends at Vision Impossible created a full-length projection show that incorporated not just the stage, but also involved the audience members’ smartphones and even their dinner tables. VJ Berry van Dijk told us all about what it took to make that happen.
This was a project we did for an international footwear retailer. Once a year, they have a staff week that includes an award dinner for their entire team. It’s a real feel good event, with lots of winners in different categories: best salesperson, best team, et cetera. Every year, the CEO challenges us to come up with a spectacular show. This year, they had decided to host both the dinner and the award show in the same space. That’s how producer Erik Arens 
Met René te Riele and I created a truly over-the-top opening act that had people oohing and aahing. And of course, everyone there was hoping to receive an award. We used projections to turn the dinner tables into “Wheel of Fortune”-like quiz stages, and people could use a custom-made app on their phones to answer multiple choice questions. Meanwhile, the management was up on stage in front of a full-on prize display projection, whipping the room into a frenzy. We’d also used their image in the table animations, turning the entire room into a very lively augmented reality space. Top it off with some branding and good food, and the whole room came together as one.
The technique we used is called “projection mapping”. It means creating an optical illusion through meticulously calculating the shape and size of the table and other objects involved. In order to do that, we had 40 projectors suspended from ceiling trusses (metal frameworks used in stage design). And that wasn’t even including the projectors we needed for the stage! We’d never used that many projectors at the same time before. The projectors were connected to several media servers; basically, heavy-duty computers. Each table was color-coded so we could tell them apart, control them separately, and ensure proper timing. And then, of course, every table was itself split up into 12 different segments. All in all, we couldn’t exactly sit back and relax… Projects like these hinge on technology, and getting it just right is a tall order. But I love it when the audience has absolutely no idea of what’s going on behind the scenes, and people can just drink in the magic of the moment.
This production involved the following parties:
