Dynamic Chroma-Key Background for Immersive Virtual Reality Acting
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional chroma-key backgrounds, such as green or blue screens, often result in lifeless performances from actors as they lack cues and emotional interaction with 3D virtual scene elements, making it difficult for actors to focus and track CGI characters or objects, and the lighting differences between physical and virtual environments can make actors appear superimposed rather than part of the scene.
Innovation Solution
A virtual-reality environment with dynamic chroma-key backgrounds that are displayed in conjunction with 3D virtual scenes, allowing actors to interact with real-time graphics and be illuminated correctly, using tracking technologies to maintain proper perspective and minimize matte-edge detail, ensuring the actor only sees a chroma-key background directly behind them, which is dynamically resized and moved to match their movements.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If chroma-key backgrounds are used, then actors can be superimposed onto different backgrounds, but actors appear lifeless and disconnected from the virtual scene
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a virtual-reality environment as an intermediary between the actor and the final background. The actor interacts with virtual elements (avatars, objects, lighting) that mediate their performance, providing emotional cues and spatial context that chroma-key alone cannot provide, while still allowing background substitution
Solution Approach 2:
The system segments the visual environment into distinct layers: the chroma-key background layer, the virtual-reality overlay layer, and the actor layer. This allows the actor to see and interact with virtual elements in the overlay layer while the chroma-key layer remains invisible to them but visible in the final composite, resolving the contradiction between background versatility and performance quality
2Adaptability or versatility
If chroma-key backgrounds are used, then background flexibility is improved, but lighting mismatches cause actors to appear superimposed rather than integrated
Solution Approach 1:
The system dynamically changes lighting parameters in the virtual-reality environment to match the intended final background. Virtual light sources are adjusted in intensity, color temperature, and direction to replicate the lighting conditions of the destination scene, ensuring the actor is illuminated correctly before capture, which eliminates lighting mismatches in the final composite
Solution Approach 2:
The lighting setup is established in advance within the virtual-reality environment before the actor performs. The system pre-configures virtual light sources to match the target background's lighting conditions, so that when the actor is captured against the chroma-key background, they are already properly illuminated, eliminating the need for post-production lighting correction
3Reliability
If full 3D virtual scenes are displayed to actors, then emotional interaction is improved, but chroma-key extraction becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The display is segmented into different chroma-key regions that are dynamically activated. Only the portions of the virtual scene that would appear behind the actor from the camera's perspective are displayed in chroma-key, while other areas show the full virtual scene. This segmentation allows the actor to see virtual elements for emotional engagement while ensuring clean chroma-key extraction in the regions that need to be removed
Solution Approach 2:
Different regions of the visual field are given different qualities: regions that will be behind the actor have chroma-key properties for easy extraction, while regions that will be visible in the final scene retain their full visual quality. This local differentiation allows the actor to receive emotional cues from virtual elements without compromising matte extraction quality in critical areas
Data Source
AI summary
A method may include displaying, on one or more display devices in a virtual-reality environment, a visual representation of a 3-D virtual scene from the perspective of a subject location in the virtual-reality environment. The method may also include displaying, on the one or more display devices, a chroma-key background with the visual representation. The method may further include recording, using a camera, an image of the subject in the virtual-reality environment against the chroma-key background.