ITN's development of a virtual touch screen

When presenters can interact directly with a virtual graphic by touching or sliding it, it gives those graphics an even greater sense of reality and preserves the “magic” illusion of the set. This was especially the case for the recent US mid-term elections, where presenters could be seen sliding huge virtual wall panels of voting graphics with just the flick of a finger.

Ian White, Head of Computer Graphics for ITN, tells the story behind their virtual touchscreen project

 

When we re-launched our flagship news programme, “News at Ten”, in January 2008 we wanted to enable our correspondents to control their own graphics using a touchscreen within our studio. The added complication is that our studios at ITN are virtual, shot against a chroma green screen. This means that anything green on the touchscreen would be keyed out and rendered invisible by the Vizrt virtual set system! There is a high probability that most content we’d want to show on the touchscreen would contain some green.

The solution we came up with was actually to make all graphics on the touchscreen monochrome green and to shroud the entire touchscreen, stand and all, in green. We then replaced the now invisible real touchscreen with a virtual touchscreen positioned exactly match the real one. The presenter can see their green graphics well enough to touch and interact with them, but the viewers only see a beautifully rendered full colour virtual touchscreen – and all in real-time.

 

An interactive Viz Artist (built on version 2.8) scene running on the real touchscreen controls the virtual graphics rendered by the virtual set system. The virtual touchscreen has one big advantage, it no longer has to look like a real LCD or Plasma - usually rather dull. For the News at Ten set we created a slim sheet of interactive glass, and because the set is virtual, we were able to make the glass and the graphics within it translucent, allowing the set backdrop to be seen through it. Something impossible to achieve with a real LCD in a real set!

Election 2010

For our live Election 2010 programme we took this technique even further. Our Election virtual reality set was made up with many glass panels including a virtual holographic glass wall containing interactive 3D graphics. 

We used two invisible touchscreens to create very large interactive surface. Our presenter had full control of her graphics including the wall graphic we called the ‘Battleground’ comprising over 200 of the most important ‘target’ seats the Conservative party were trying to win.

 

The 2010 UK general election finally resulted in a hung Parliament consisting of a coalition of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Parties, and our presenter was able to explore every possible coalition scenario, involving 11 different parties! 

She manipulated the 3D VR graphic interactively and all the calculations where done automatically within the Viz scene, from live election data.

The overall impression for the viewer was clear, clean graphics seamlessly integrated into the studio, which the presenter could freely interact with to analyse and explain the story as it unfolds