SXSW Panel Recap: The Biz of Being Human: Volumetric Humans at Scale

Amy Lameyer (l), Jacqueline Shorter-Beauchamp, Piotr Uzarowicz, and Steve Sullivan on The Biz of Being Human: Volumetric Humans at Scale panel during South By Southwest 2023 (Photo by John Anderson)

Body? Doubled. Or, hell, why not tripled?

The idea with volumetric video is that hi-tech equipment will capture the physical presence of humans (or other objects, whether static or moving) and replicate their image in three full dimensions for use in film and TV and so on, and for projecting into actual space as holograms (at natural size or variations therefrom), thus becoming, yeah: The next best thing to being there, so they say.

They, for this “The Biz of Being Human: Volumetric Humans at Scale” panel were Amy Lameyer of WXR Fund, a company that “invests in gender diverse seed stage companies that are transforming business and human interaction with spatial computing (VR/AR) and artificial intelligence;” Jacqueline Shorter-Beauchamp of Engaged Media Studios, a digital production company producing a variety of VR/MR/AR integrated products; Piotr Uzarowicz, head of marketing and partnerships for Arcturus, the software leader in the post-production and streaming of volumetric videos; and Steve Sullivan, who leads the Mixed Reality Capture Studios program at Microsoft.

These four industry titans offered the packed auditorium a look at the state of the industry today, discussing the challenges and opportunities in hardware, bandwidth, privacy, security, identity, AI integration, and more.

The opportunities – the use and presentation of volumetric capture across all media and within urban spaces and stadiums and the like – seem to be multiplying, as things stand now, and those opps will only increase as the array of challenges are met. One of the most basic, nontech challenges, as Arcturus’ Uzarowicz pointed out, is “educating people as to the ROI that volumetric humans can bring. Because CGI (computer-generated imagery) is still the bigger thing, and it can do amazing things, but CGI isn’t fully human – CGI can’t quite get it.”

The ROI, see? Return On Investment. How very South by to mention that, right? In other words, getting businesses – beyond WXR Fund, though, as that investment group seems to be, wisely, backing a veritable and growing army of the nascent industry’s best – getting businesses to grok the sort of profits available for reaping via commercial applications of this novel form of human representation.

And those applications could be merely fresh gambits of advertising; or they could be in the service of less money-driven creative expression; but, as with many things in our modern world, they’ll likely be some combination of the two. Whether potentially delightful – “capturing my kids with volumetrics, and having those representations, those memories, available for their grandparents,” noted Microsoft’s Sullivan – or potentially fraught – “volumetrics can provide much better training for law enforcement,” said Uzarowicz – it seems likely that volumetrically captured and presented human presence will be yet another large part of the rapidly resolving jigsaw puzzle that, more and more, begins to resemble any number of Black Mirror episodes.

The Biz of Being Human: Volumetric Humans at Scale

XR+Metaverse Track