An Immersive Experience: Creating a Volumetric Time-Lapse Using Unreal Engine
Forager combines time-lapse photography with 3D photogrammetry and volumetric image capture to create an immersive VR experience.
What do Creative Director Winslow Porter and Technical Director Elie Zananiri have in common? A love of technology and mushrooms. A strange pairing perhaps, but one that brings the forest to life, and lets you discover the magical world beneath your feet.
Their project Forager, is an immersive experience, powered by Dell Precision AI workstations and NVIDIA Omniverse, where you and the mushroom kingdom converge.
Winslow Porter is an award-winning director, producer and creative technologist specialising in virtual/augmented reality as well as large-scale immersive installations. And Elie Zananiri is an Emmy-award winning creative developer, specialising in large-scale installations, graphics programming, and virtual reality. His work experiments with breaking social boundaries in public, through immersive experiences and generative compositions.
By developing cutting-edge 3D scanning hardware and software, the Forager team has begun capturing a library of mushrooms growing over time and play them back as hyperrealistic animations in Unreal Engine. This is the first ever volumetric time-lapse inside of a game engine.
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Learn more about the Forager workflow, powered by Dell Precision AI workstations and NVIDIA Omniverse.
So, why does an artsy VR experience where you become part of fungi’s underground root world matter?
"Because we’ve degraded 1/3 of the Earth’s soil and are tracking to degrade the other 2/3 in our lifetime. In other words, we’re in a crisis where a lot of our dirt is no longer alive. No longer feeding plants. No longer turning dead matter into living matter. No longer storing massive amounts of carbon. The underground network that fungi create are what make dirt alive. They’re more important than plants. They’re more important than animals. All the magic happens underground. No one sees it. When you can’t see it, it’s hard to feel anything for it. That’s why Forager exists," says Karen Short, Global Executive Creative Director / Managing Director for Accenture Song’s Sustainability Studio, who was also part of the team delivering this project.
Learn more about the Forager experience and how this project was brought to life here.