Jason Hunter

Base

Full name	Jason Hunter
Summary	Scanning objects and cityscapes using photogrammetry and Lidar scanners to create virtual reality worlds for the construction/renovation, video games and movie industry
Introduce yourself, your experience and your credentials	As the Virtual Reality Lead, Jason focuses on virtual cinematography at SIRT. His responsibilities include designing and directing virtual reality production from ideation to launch. Furthermore, Jason develops new workflows and efficiencies for content creation. Jason completed his B.A in Multimedia & Theatre and Film at McMaster University and then studied Directing & Editing for Film at Sheridan College. His extensive experience allows him to provide training and applied research in order to support local SMEs in adopting Virtual and Augmented realities.
Describe your research	The research that I’m doing here is to scan and create real-world assets and optimize them for virtual reality experiences. What that means is we’re using several technologies to scan real-world objects and bring them into the virtual world. Behind me you see a photogrammetry tree which is a series of cameras that we use to capture objects, scan them, and then use software to reconstruct them as 3D objects and bring them into virtual reality. We’re also using laser technology Lidar scanners to scan environments and bring in full cityscapes into virtual environments. The challenge of this is not actually the scanning and the creating of these objects, but it’s actually the optimization and making the file sizes small enough that they can be viewed in consumer level peripheral reality devices such as oculus rift live or other other headsets. Lidar scanners have been around for a long time and their main benefit is that they’re extremely precise down to about two millimeters. So we can use this for architectural purposes to get really large spaces indoor or outdoor and get precise models and the position of certain things. So that could be helpful if you are for example renovating an existing building you could take a 3D scan of it and then virtually create your new addition. So you would have a virtual asset that would be proportionally correct and you could map out all the materials that would be required to add that addition. The benefit the photogrammetry gives us is that we can use DSLR cameras with a very high megapixel count. What that does is it gives us really dense textures and really high quality textures that are very true to life. If we combine this with Lidar you can start to see the best of both worlds we get the model that is very geometrically precise and then we have the pictures that are very high resolution being projected onto those models. Now they look extremely realistic. So the combination of these two technologies is really what is creating what is helping us get towards lifelike virtual reality experiences.
Explain its significance	Many industries are looking for way that they can integrate training education tutorials into this new medium. So it’s a natural extension that we are trying to bring our existing world into the virtual reality. So finding and optimizing the best way to bring in all of these products bring in all of these items and bring in humans into our virtual worlds is sort of a no-brainer in terms of the next steps for Virtual Reality. The medium is so diverse and will touch so many industries that getting a head start on how to effectively portray our world in the virtual space is really what’s going to keep us on the leading edge.