Project
Depthcast AR
UI · UX · Unity Engineer
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Overview
Red Bull E-Sports Studio initially contacted me to see how difficult adding augmented reality graphics to their broadcast using Unity and Vive tracking. Industry broadcast tracking solutions cost around $100k at the time, so that created the incentive to build an in-house product.
Approach
At the time Unity had no support for live broadcast workflows, so I needed to engineer solutions to multiple common problems:
- Synchronizing framerates between Unity environment and the production camera shutter
- Managing the offset between the tracker (Vive controller) and the broadcast camera
- Outputting Unity as a chroma keyed layer that producers could mix live
- Injecting the broadcast video feed back into Unity as a render texture to create reflections.
- Mixing virtual lighting to match real-world lighting
I also eventually included functionality that made editing the scene easier during runtime. This included object manipulation inside VR space using controllers, as well as a desktop client that was synchronized using firebase + photon.
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