CinCraft Scenario: The Most Flexible Camera Tracker on the Market?

Welcome to another edition of VP Land.

In this issue:

🎯 ZEISS releases a new camera tracker
👓 Blending Unreal with AR
💾 SanDisk SSDs keep crashing

and more! Let’s dive in.

MAIN STAGE

ZEISS wastes no time putting Ncam acquisition to work

Talk about fast. It’s barely been 3 weeks since ZEISS announced the acquisition of Ncam, maker of camera tracking hardware, and they just dropped some new hardware.

At SIGGRAPH ZEISS announced CinCraft Scenario, a new camera tracking ecosystem.

Lots of tracking options

Compared to other real-time trackers, the CinCraft Scenario's unique selling point is its flexibility in where and how it can track.

• Indoors / Outdoors

• Green / Blue Screen

• LED Volumes

It’s got three tracking options

• Natural Feature Tracking: ZEISS says as long as there’s enough ‘detail,’ like brick walls or window frames, it can track the camera position using these natural features (not clear if this is real-time tracking or post-processing to get camera position data for VFX)

• Reflective Markers: Track small, reflective markers on the floor using infrared. (Similar to how Mo-Sys tracks position, but unclear if you can calibrate a stage once and keep reusing the setup or if you have to calibrate every time)

• Digital Markers: Hiding trackers in LED walls using frame remapping. Doesn’t specify if that’s restricted to a specific frame remapping solution, but this is a use case that was demoed by GhostFrame in our interview at NAB.

The hardware:

The tracking hardware is comprised of three pieces of gear (looks like the same Ncam hardware, just housed in a more rugged shell with ZEISS branding).

• CamBar: Mounts to the camera to track objects or markers

• Link: Mounted on camera, communicates with the Origin

• Origin: Runs the Scenario software to track the camera’s position

And when it comes to calibrating the lens - the big advantage of being a lens company that buys a camera tracking manufacturer is plug-and-play integration.

No calibration is needed when you use any ZEISS lens (but you can also calibrate and use any non-ZEISS lens)

CinCraft Software

CinCraft has existed for about a year, starting with an option to measure lens data for VFX.

Now the CinCraft ecosystem has expanded.

• Scenario: Operates the lens tracking system

• Wrangler: Records real-time tracking data and camera/lens metadata

• Export: Send tracking data to VFX apps

• UE Connect: Unreal integration

No word on pricing or release schedule, but you can get updates here.

How do you think this compares to other tracking solutions on the market? Hit reply and let us know.

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VIDEO VILLAGE

AKS

🌐 Around the Web

• Brilliant Labs announces the release of arGPT Monocle for iOS, its ChatGPT-enabled smart glasses

• Article from Meta on Reality Labs’ Display Systems Research team to drive further advancements in VR innovation

• Roblox aims to achieve Westworld-easy designed AI generative tools

• Schedule posts and track your social media with Metricool*

• AWS Storage Day 2023 recap

• Looks like the SanDisk portable SSDs keep crashing and losing data

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