The 7th Guest VR remake uses 'volumetric video' for 3D FMV scenes
Fantastic '90s puzzle adventure game The 7th Guest is being remade in VR, and developers Vertigo Studios and Exkee are using a cool solution to recreate the original's FMV acting in realtime 3D environments.
In The 7th Guest, you're trapped in a toy maker's spooky mansion with the apparitions of six previous guests who mysteriously disappeared. In between solving riddles and geometry puzzles, the story of those guests plays out in the style of a dinner theater production, with semi-transparent video of actors overlaid on pre-rendered 3D sets.
In the VR remake, players can explore those sets in real time while the FMV scenes play out. If the ghostly guests were still portrayed with flat video clips, they'd appear like Doom's cardboard-cutout sprites, constantly rotating to face the player. Vertigo could've designed 3D character models and animated them with performance capture, but it wouldn't have felt quite the same as video, so instead, the studio recorded actors with «volumetric video» capture.
«Volumetric video is like 'bullet time' from the Matrix,» says game director Paul van der Meer. «The actors stand in the middle of a circle while they're being filmed by cameras all around them. The result is a series of meshes with textures that update each frame.»
According to Van der Meer, «you really have that sensation of being in the same room» as the actors when viewing the scenes in VR.
«It's amazing to see how well the original capture translates over to the game,» he said. «A pleat in a dress, the movement of a jacket. And of course the performances of the actors. An eye roll, a smirk, all those subtleties you pick up on.»
Vertigo Games worked with a Dutch studio called 4DR to record the actors using technology
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