MPC NY Breaks the Mold for The One Club and JWT with Fracture.io

This year, MPC Digital teamed up with The One Club via JWT New York to create Fracture.io, an installation experience for The One Show’s after party at NYC’s Bowery Hotel. Fracture.io allowed a selection of the advertising and design industries’ biggest players to enter the digital space, taking 3D scans of pose-striking partygoers to generate beautifully abstracted, full body 3D renderings.

The team at MPC Digital aimed to create a real-time 3D scanning and visualization system using little more than off-the-shelf hardware, the Microsoft Kinect. The result was an uncomplicated installation that functioned clearly, and which served as a testament to the creativity celebrated at the evening’s One Show awards ceremony.

Fracture.io took the form of a 12 x 16 ft room (built with fabrication and AV partner SenovvA) with four Microsoft Kinects aimed at the center, where guests were invited to pose for the cameras. Using their OpenFrameworks application, MPC Digital was able to capture full image and depth data. A modified version of PCL then stitched this data into a smooth mesh and calculated the normal – a scanning system that allowed the team to dial exposure time up or down, more effectively balancing accuracy and speed.

Once the mesh was created, it could be used as the basis for generative 3D visualizations of guests’ forms. The mesh could then be imported into Unity, which wrapped the form in splines bearing custom 3D objects. All of this occurred near instantaneously, displayed on massive screens both within and outside of the booth. On these screens the camera panned over the guest’s form and surrounding environment, using a custom dynamic rack focus system driven by the same sort of 3×3 matrix found in high-end autofocus cameras.

Animations and meshes were then exported and automatically assigned URLs on the Fracture.io website gallery, allowing guests to view and share their portraits.

Fracture IO from MPC Digital on Vimeo.