After touching on Pixar's rejection of motion capture in my previous post, I decided to look into the studio's patents to see whether there's anything that would suggest they are taking another look at the idea.
Lo and behold, Pixar's latest filing, published on November 10, is for "light field [plenoptic] lenses" that can be used with "conventional cameras (e.g., digital or photographic/film, image and video/movie cameras) to create light field imaging systems".
Similar applications dating from 2010 were published* by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) earlier in the year and somehow managed to stay under the radar.
The applications state that "data collected by these light field imaging systems can then be used to produce 2D images [or] right eye/left eye 3D images... as well as to render and manipulate images using a computer graphics rendering engine and compositing tools."
Cameras that capture the entire light field—instead of a single plane of light like conventional cameras—have been around for years in research settings, but only now are beginning to find real-world uses. (The Lytro is the first consumer product to hit the market.)
It's long been known that data from an advanced light field surveillance camera, for example, could be used to create a photorealistic CG model of a suspect. It seems that Pixar is looking into applying a similar technique with moving images.
Such a system could conceivably capture all of a performer's complex facial expressions in stereoscopic 3-D. The greatest limitation of current mocap systems, which track select muscle groups, is, of course, that they can only capture some movements.
The Disney Research website confirms that David DiFrancesco, one the inventors named in the applications, is currently "researching instrumentation to capture lightfields for use in 3D cinematography and videography" at the Pixar Research Group in Emeryville.
The stated purpose of the Pixar Research Group is to develop new technologies that can be applied specifically to Pixar's films.
*United States Patent Applications 20110169994, 20110249341, 20110273609.
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