[June 3rd, 2009]
Spacecam at work
Posted by Michael
One of my students - Thomas Lodato - has been playing around with some ideas about how a editing program might look and work if the depicted action is not a pre-rendered movie but a live rendered 3D image. The rough prototype he presents with Spacecam is our idea of a “spatial editor”. Such an editing system first tracks the movements of characters in Unreal and then allows editors to create and control cameras externally in relation to this recorded action.

The main idea is to combine that with a demo recording and demo replay, so one could literally edit a demo playback from an external source. Spacecam is still very rough but I still like the idea of a “spatial editor” that uses maps and paths instead of only timelines and frame numbers. It changes the editing quite a bit. For example, we implemented it on an touch screen laptop and if only the touch screen abilities would have been more stable, it would be possible to create and control cameras very intuitively.
There is also some work under way to combine this work with David Elson’s and Mark Riedl’s Cambot project that stages camera and actor behavior in UT2K4 completely automatically based on a AI system in the background. In fact, Brian O’Neil, Mark, and myself had a short paper at CHI describing how these systems could merge.
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