An R&D summer

A studious summer for Novacom High Tech! Come fall, the team will have integrated real-time 3D into our multimedia CMS. An innovative technology that realistically incorporates virtual objects in a real-time video segment, which we will be able to do on an industrial scale for your projects. In other developments, the platform will be supporting a variety of formats. Thus, a single piece of rich-media content will be distributed as video, and in formats suitable for the web, smartphones and tablet devices. Don’t miss it!

NovaStudio

NovaStudio is a content management system (CMS) for rich media designed, developed and maintained by the Innovation department of the Novacom Group. It is regularly updated to incorporate functional and technical enhancements.

This software has been used to produce all the rich media programs developed by the Novacom Group since 2004, notably, those done for the Gabon Museum of Art and Traditions, the first virtual museum done in pre-computed 3D including nearly 300 artworks displayed in some 20 different areas, and for Renault’s virtual world, the first virtual showroom showcasing all 27 models in the lineup and featuring interactive multimedia consoles. (plus 300 clips with audiovisual content).

Updatable Real-Time 3D Space

We are convinced that real-time 3D will become commonplace on the web through the use of marketing and communications products. The mechanism for doing this must be flexible, responsive and scalable, all at an acceptable cost.

Novacom Innovation is working to perfect a production process and a CMS tool that will make it possible to develop and update the content of a showroom, a shop, or the floor of an exhibition hall, with a real-time 3D navigation system just as easily as you can do now with a page of html.

[the demo requires installing the Unity 3D plug-in – available for Mac and PC on IE, Firefox, or Safari in just seconds]

Web & Mobile TV Rich Media

Novacom Innovation has developed a player that can play interactive videos and offers “Web 2.0” style functionality (voting, comments, sharing, video submission). A rich media CMS makes it possible to update content, to organize it by channel and category, and schedule it for live broadcast.

Real-Time 3D Video Overlay

Novacom Innovation has developed a chromakey solution making it possible to take characters filmed on a background and insert them directly into a real-time 3D world.

R&D Project: Rich Media & Semantics

It is often said that the web of today, which is primarily text-based, is rich in content but poor in information, and this is even more true for videos and animations. This type of content is increasingly common on the web, and increasingly demanded by Internet users, but it is most often “mute” in terms of interaction, extrapolation, and the user experience is largely like a simple linear viewing experience. Under no circumstances does such content have any natural ability to offer you links to other related content, unless it is through frequently vague or redundant keywords at the end of the clip, and it does not offer the opportunity to dig deeper or move further into the topic that the content is about. General foraging is the only means of exploration available.

But this content represents a powerful means of disseminating knowledge, information, and training, if only we could integrate a modicum of intelligence.

The “consumption” of video is increasingly done through interactive channels (web and mobile) which naturally leads to a demand for more substantial interaction from Internet and mobile device users. Moreover, this non-textual content is usually autonomous (poorly ranked) and in the future it will increasingly be distributed to the far reaches of the web (only loosely connected to any specific portal, especially for branded content). It seems increasingly essential that these pieces of content be enhanced with a semantic layer that would make it possible to link them together.

Novacom Innovation’s R&D project is intended to propose:

• an authoring tool making it possible to create semantic rich media scenarios from existing or original content,
• a player designed to make use of such content, offering a unique user experience, something like the immersive world of video games where the scenario is dense, the degree of interaction is high, and navigation is fluid.