Brainstorm is coordinating the European Project AdMiRe ‘Advanced Mixed Realities’, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Programme. As well as Brainstorm, the project partners include Disguise (a UK technology company), the Norwegian Technical University NTNU, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra UPF and the Lausanne Polytechnic School EPFL. The project also involves the Norwegian public television station NRK, the Romanian broadcaster TVR and the Luxembourg sports channel Premier Sports as end users.

‘The project focuses on the development and validation of Mixed Reality solutions to improve the interest and participation of the television audience as well as the generation of more attractive content’, says Francisco Ibáñez, R&D Project Manager at Brainstorm and Coordinator of AdMiRe. «Currently, TV audiences can only interact with the programmes they are watching through social networks or broadband hybrid TV. In addition, content creators in film, television or live productions face technical challenges delivering attractive, interactive content. AdMiRe will develop a solution that addresses both problems by embracing the innovative potential of mixed reality technology. The solution will enable home audiences to virtually join the television show they are watching and interact with presenters and guests in the television studio. The solution will also provide content creators with tools that radically improve the integration of the presenter within hyper-realistic virtual environments and facilitate their interaction with synthetic elements.

Javier Montesa, Technical Coordinator of the Project, says that AdMiRe will incorporate highly innovative video capture, processing and transmission technologies and will explore super-resolution and background subtraction technologies in order to bring the audience much closer to the broadcast experience in the most realistic and simple way possible, using standard mobile devices. AdMiRe will enable interaction between viewers and broadcasters to be taken to the next level. ‘Until now, the audience could participate in TV shows through audio and video messages or videoconferencing. With AdMiRe we will bring the viewer into the live broadcast where they can interact with presenters and guests’.

Brainstorm will adapt its current teleportation technology and Disguise will further develop its XR (Extended Reality) studio technology based on LED screens in order to integrate them into AdMiRe and achieve a very high level of immersion and interaction. The EPFL will study the innovative application of the technologies used in deep fake videos within immersive communication, exploring the implications for the application of the AdMire solution and the UPF will integrate HDR and intelligent capture technologies to increase the realism of the objects and people captured by mobile devices. NTNU will be responsible for validating the results developed and integrated into the project with three European television stations (NRK, Premier Sports and TVR).

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952027. The progress and the results obtained can be followed on www.admire3d.eu as well as on the project’s social networks.