Princess Leia’s desperate holographic plea to Obi-Wan Kenobi might have been a vision of the far flung future in 1977, but today, volumetric capture is making that a reality. Using cameras and the AR cloud to map and replicate an object in three-dimensional space, volumetric capture has lots of practical use cases – Raj and Alan talk about a bunch of them.
Alan: Today’s guest is Raj Puran, director of client XR Business Development and Partnerships at Intel. Raj is a 25-year veteran of the semiconductor and software industry with Intel Corp. He is currently director of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, focusing on growth areas of compute in virtual, augmented, and extended realities. Raj has spent the last four years of his tenure on building business opportunities, use cases, experiential marketing with partnerships in location-based entertainment, museums, education and other commercial XR segments. Prior to moving into business development, Raj has held several positions in I.T. systems, engineering, data center engineering, information security, network and cellular IP development, ERP business engineering, and Healthcare Solutions Development Budget leads opportunities for his customers and partners to utilize exciting and intense compute power in the immersive technology and XR landscape. Through a collective ecosystem of compute-focused processing, storage, sensing technology, data processing, content creation solutions, and new innovations in the area of wireless VR, AR, 5G, artificial intelligence, volumetric capture, and immersive sports available from Intel. To learn more about Intel, visit Intel.com. Raj, I’m very excited to welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on.
Raj: Alan, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to speak to you again.
Alan: It’s really amazing. The last time we saw each other was at the Mixed Reality Marketing Summit in New York City, which was a really amazing conference. It was kind of like an un-conference. It was in the basement of the National Geographic exhibit, where you could walk around and see all sorts of amazing things. And in the basement of this center was some of the brightest minds in XR Technologies getting together to discuss the marketing capabilities. And I know you have worked on everything from the marketing side to education side. Tell us, what are you doing at Intel to drive XR forward?
Raj: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us is we are known as a PC platform company, but I think we’re bigger than that, obviously. We’re doing things in the area of volumetric capture. We’re working on a portable volumetric solutions like RealSense sensing solutions, which allows you to create really elaborate programs around immersive media and immersive experiences.
Alan: Let’s unpack that one thing. What do you mean by volumetric capture?
Raj: Volumetric capture has generally been where you place a subject or an object or a person in a series of cameras, right? So this is basically a room; an array of cameras are set up, and the subject is in the center point of that array of cameras. And essentially, a singular object is captured, and then it’s — utilizing point cloud and the camera data — you essentially create a 3D object, right? That could be a 3D rendering of said person, or object, or whatever that subject may be. And you are able to then utilize that; whether you utilize it in a 2D production or 3D production like VR, you can then utilize that to be used as holograms, or virtual characters, or so forth.
Alan: So being able to create recreate the Star Wars little hologram thing.
Raj: Absolutely. And that’s one of the use cases, right? So, h