“Creating a live broadcast from a virtual environment” by Greenhalgh, Bowers, Walker, Wyver, Benford, et al. …

“Inhabited Television” combines multiuser virtual environments with television, so that online audience-members can participate in TV shows staged in a virtual world. It is presented simultaneously both to conventional passive viewers and to online participants. In many cases it benefits from being broadcast live. This paper is based on our fourth major experiment with Inhabited TV, a live virtual game show called “Out Of This World”. For this event we adopted non-automated approaches to camera control and mixing to allow an exploration of appropriate forms of presentation for inhabited television. We describe the techniques which were used to create and enhance the live video output which was produced during the show: appropriate world design; dynamic constraints on participant movements; and a performance-oriented virtual camera control interface. This camera control interface includes explicit support for a range of spatial and temporal control styles. We also give evaluative feedback on the camera control interface and the event’s (television-based) approach to mixing and directing, drawing on a social scientific field study conducted on-site during the preparation for, and performances of, the show.

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