Inside an unassuming building near Los Angeles International Airport is a 25,000-square-foot soundstage. At the center of that space sits a dome of cameras and lights, pointing down from the ceiling. This is Intel Studios, which houses the world’s largest volumetric video studio. And this could be the future of sports broadcasting.
Digital pictures, moving or still, are composed of multitudes of tiny squares called pixels. Volumetric video is made up of voxels: cubes instead of squares—data with depth. Paramount Pictures is already on board to explore its cinematic potential.
To generate volumetric video, arrays of cameras capture 2D views that powerful computers process together to generate a 3D, voxellated, model of the real world.