Honda fans got a preview of the all-new 2022 Honda Civic Sedan as well as a live streamed concert from a Grammy and Academy Award winning artist in the 20th Anniversary Honda Civic Tour. The event, broadcasted on Twitch, was an extended reality (xR) experience powered by disguise xR with changing virtual landscapes enhancing the artist’s unforgettable performance as well as sharing a glimpse of the new car.
For around four to five months, virtual production experts Sixdegrees and All of it Now (AOIN) worked with content creators at Immanent to mingle the artist’s live transitions into three realistic virtual environments: a city that transforms into a jungle, a red-rocks cave interior and a mountain top.
Added to this was a 3D model of the new Honda Civic travelling through an extended reality environment.
The content creation team at Immanent crafted 3D worlds for three stages in Los Angeles used in the live streamed event. This proved to be an important test for disguise and the camera-tracking technology, which had to work flawlessly in a live, raw world instead of a shoot that was heavily produced and edited later. The calibration and changeovers had to be flawless.
AOIN used a disguise vx 2 media server as the director to render the xR feeds and a vx 4 to render the LED video wall and floor feeds. An rx machine was used in the uncompressed 25G mode, along with Mellanox MSN2010 switches, to achieve better image quality and colour reproduction. Since failover was not an option on the live broadcast, a second vx 4 and an additional rx machine were run as understudies in separate sessions.
“Real-time camera switching was a crucial element for the success of this project: It gave the director the freedom to switch cameras as if it were a standard live show,” said Danny Firpo, Producer at AOIN. “We used the IoCore 2 box to receive a camera tally and convert it to OSC for camera switching, and it worked flawlessly."
“We had anticipated up to a minute or two to transition into the three different environments. After we optimised the [disguise] solo environments and set them up for level streaming it ended up taking only about 10 seconds to transition from one scene to another. I was kind of amazed that we were able to move that fast!” said Drew Best, CEO of Immanent and Visual Content Director of the show.
disguise’s new virtual zoom feature was also used to great effect on this project. The virtual zoom extended the virtual scene to allow cameras to zoom in and out of each scene - giving the team more freedom of motion to explore the 3D worlds.
“Using xR tools [for a live performance] was definitely a step forward for the team, and so many people helped us make sure there was a smooth transition into that workflow. We were able to create real-time rendered content that could be adjusted on the fly. disguise has the highest set of standards for this type of production. I can't imagine doing this event without it,” said Juan Santillan, CEO of Six Degrees and Executive Producer of the show.
Over one million people watched the live show.