Q&A With Mechanism Digital's Lucien Harriot

Lucien Harriot is visual-effects director at New York-based design house Mechanism Digital — a cutting-edge East Coast facility producing effects and motion-graphics solutions for a client list that includes HBO's Entourage, Casio, Duracell, Prudential, The Discovery Channel, MSNBC, and Tide. Harriot discusses the transforming of digital technologies for today's content creators. For more on Harriot, visit Mechanism's Reel-Exchange profile at reel-exchange.com/members/f2f55225/profile.

Is there a visual concept you wished you could create, but technology has yet to provide the path?

Harriot: [A] related technology to matchmoving is extracting 3D models from the many points used to calculate the camera position. Theoretically, once we know the location of these points in space, we can create 3D geometry of the objects using the same (or more) track points. This technology exists, but is in its infancy compared to what we imagine the future could bring. Imagine walking around with a video camera and capturing everything in your room in realtime. Virtually painting the world into your computer then being able to fly through the 3D models as you would in a video game. Currently, laser scanning captures the highest-quality information to produce 3D geometry, but scanning can be very expensive, cumbersome, and costly to post-process the huge amounts of data (days of labor and processing for a simple scene).

After years of struggling with scanner data, in 2001, Mechanism partnered with a few very smart people and co-founded Brainstorm Technology to develop a better solution to bringing the real world into 3D. We started by creating tools to manage scanner data but quickly realized we should be working with 2D footage as scanners were not common and the quality of digital imagery is increasing at an amazing pace. Brainstorm is currently developing a plug-in for Google SketchUp which will cost a few hundred bucks as a user-assisted tool for creating geometry from images while we continue our R&D and get closer to realizing the ultimate goal of being able to capture 3D with textures quickly from video which will not only revolutionize the 3D animation and gaming industry, but even allow consumers to walk through their vacation years later by processing their video and photos into 3D scenes.

As a digital content creator, what difficulties, if any, do you see over the next year?

I hear some companies complaining the economy's downturn has resulted in reduced industry budgets for 3D effects, but we haven't felt it yet. In general, we haven't found that budgets are getting less as much as the audience and client's expectations are more demanding without the budgets growing. Granted, hardware is getting faster and software is getting smarter, but it still takes a well-trained, well-paid artist/technician to make it look good — but the necessary number of labor hours to make the audience believe has probably increased.

Read the rest of Harriot's Q&A at reel-exchange.com/insider/lucien_harriot.

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