During 2009 elections to European Parliament TVN24 for the first time used virtual set to present audience with results. As I mentioned in previous post everything was done in short deadlines. Was the result acceptable? Well, in my opinion it was, but I’m going to let everyone decide for themselves. Below you can find short case study on what was done to make this all happen.

The Goal

The idea of this specific virtual set was to create a place where presenter is able to control everything around him. Our intention was to convince audience that he is in charge there and makes it all happen by himself.

Implementation

It all started with concept that we should use interactive plasma screen inside our green-room. Once we managed to move it, this concept evolved – plasma screen should be invisible. Well everything is possible with virtual set. But we stumbled upon some difficulties with hiding plasma screen. The first was time – we had only two and a half weeks left to elections. It’s really short time to prepare proper hiding elements. The second was the height of our green room. Basically it’s height is around 4 meters from floor to ceiling. When you add lights to this you get operational height around 2.5 meters! That gives very small space for camera man to shoot nice picture. Since plasma screen should be properly lit to disappear another problem emerges: light blicks. In our studio they were almost impossible to avoid. Finally we managed to set everything so the picture was rather acceptable.

Green Room with plasma screen

In our concept all graphics in virtual set was controlled by presenter. Of course it’s not trivial for a person inside green room to move around in natural way, mostly because he “wanders in darkness” :-) (he doesn’t actually see virtual elements). When he also needs to play graphics for himself – it becomes really hard. Having this in mind we decided to limit virtual graphics to just few templates, stages presenter will have to learn how to show.

Early concept :-)

While developing graphics we used director mechanisms introduced in viz 3.x. Each presentation consisted of two directors. One to show presentation and move to next phase, and one to hide presentation regardless of its current position. To accomplish this we used feature that enables us to animate same groups in separate directors differently. So for example if we had simple presentation with result bars we had one director to show them and one to hide them in slightly different way.

Candidates results presentation

Virtual touchscreen

Videoportation

For this event we decided to prepare dedicated software to allow exporting elections data to virtual set scenes and control these scenes from touchscreen. To accomplish that – a special interactive scene was made containing only set of buttons. Once scene was initialized, it read its configuration from file. The configuration was a hierarchical data representing all possible types of graphics in ordered way. At this point I have to admit, that even though we limited number of templates to only eight, the configuration file had exactly 98 entries. (results by age groups, gender, education level… etc.). Presenter could show or hide interactive menu with a simple gesture and easily navigate through this elements and trigger desired presentation in virtual set. Since we used three viz engines to render virtual studio I decided to implement special communication protocol utilizing vizrt’s shared memory map. This decision affected also windows application I wrote to edit elections results and thus data was stored in shared memory.

Application preview: election results editor

For our convenience I also created simple software to load and initialize scenes on virtual set engines and touchscreen.

Application preview: administrative tools

Summary

• Project duration: 18 days (including tryouts with presenter)
• Creation of graphics: 10 days
• Lines of code in scenes (viz3 script): 4231
• Lines of code in applications: 11 207
• Result: TVN24 had the best audience results (SHR) for this event among Polish news channels.