Microsoft hopes to make Mixed Reality Capture Studios as common as photo booths

Speaking at the Photonics West 2019 convention recently, Microsoft’s Steve Sullivan, GM for their Mixed Reality Studio, explained how the 3D capture service currently works and their ambitions for the future.

Their stages, which are scattered around the world, allows companies to create holograms of dynamic people and performances. With the recorded content, consumers can interact with holograms in augmented reality, virtual reality, and on 2D screens. In the past, Microsoft has released some holographic video content (Buzz Aldrin, George Takei, Reggie Watts, and Max Frost).

The stage currently uses 106 synchronized cameras, half normal and half infra-red, to capture dynamic performances, and they currently have capture facilities in San Franciso, Los Angeles and London. Microsoft plans to expand to more high-end studios in 2019, but also to create “smaller, more scalable” kits which can be given to creators and academic labs to get the technology out there.

Currently, the technology is mainly in creating content for entertainment, but education and training is also an increasingly large market. Microsoft creates content for all platforms, including even Magic Leap, making the studio more a back-end for the 3D industry that a subsection of the Mixed Reality division of Microsoft.

Microsoft said that ultimately they hoped to make the technology as common as photobooths, and see consumers creating holograms of loved ones as a way of preserving their essence.

See Sullivan’s talk here.