MOTIVATION:
The REPLICATE consortium recognises the needs of Europe's Creativity Industries in three specific, interrelated areas that are hindering innovation in the sector:
1) Asset production: Synthetically-generated 3D-assets are expensive and time consuming to create. Likewise, the production of digital clones of real-world objects either requires professional setups to achieve realistic replications or models lack quality and flexibility when captured with consumer-grade devices.
2) Asset inflexibility: Objects cannot be reused across the spectrum of creative domains (e.g. Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Gaming, 3D printing, design, etc.).
3) High entry requirements: Digital creative environments and tools to enable this are non-intuitive, non-portable, expensive to setup, and require expert use.
These issues inspired the REPLICATE team to realise a project that would satiate the Creative Industries’ growing demand for new forms of diverse 3D assets and revolutionary constructor tools. We believe that the utilisation of new user experiences like AR and Mixed Reality (MR) into the Creativity pipeline could make the experience fun, engaging, flexible and more effective.
OBJECTIVES:
REPLICATE’s main goal is to stimulate and support collaborative creativity for everyone anywhere and anytime (ubiquitous co-creativity). To achieve this goal, the project will address different aspects that currently complicate the process of content creation and collaborative co-creation.
We will exploit the growing performance and ubiquity of Smartphones and Tablets combined with the increasing speed of data networks to enable the creation and reuse of digital assets through collaborative user participation. Social platforms, immersive games and MR technologies reinforce such developments through their ‘attractivity’ value and user acceptance, thereby delivering high citizen penetration potential.
REPLICATE aims to build upon leading research into the use of Smartphones and their sensors to deliver robust image-based 3D reconstruction of objects and their surroundings via highly visual, tactile and haptic user interfaces. In order to deliver real-time, interactive tools for high-quality 3D asset production, the project will balance device-based vs. cloud-based computational loading, rather than simply replacing regular computers by mobile devices. In this way, REPLICATE will facilitate everyone to take part in the creative process, anywhere and anytime, through a seamless user experience, ranging from the capturing of the real-world, modifying and adjusting objects for flexible usage, and then finally repurposing them via co-creative, MR workspaces to form novel creative media or through physical expression via rapid prototyping.
