Brief Description
Light Stage systems efficiently capture how an actor's face appears when lit from every possible lighting direction. From this captured imagery, specialized algorithms create realistic virtual renditions of the actor in the illumination of any location or set, faithfully reproducing the color, texture, shine, shading, and translucency of the actor's skin.
UC Berkeley, University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT), and USC Viterbi School of Engineering researchers invented the Light Stage technology, led by Paul Debevec (Berkeley PhD, Computer Science, 1996). The technology has enabled a variety of facial scanning and reflectance measurement techniques that have been used in various commercial applications.
The Light Stage capture devices and the image-based facial rendering system developed for character relighting in motion pictures have been used to create photo-real digital actors in films such as Spider-Man 2, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Avatar, The Avengers, Maleficent, Furious 7, and The Jungle Book. In 2014, Debevec and his lab members built and transported a mobile Light Stage system to the White House to scan President Barack Obama for a Smithsonian Institution-led project to create a 3-D presidential portrait, the first such model created of a head of state.
Through the USC Stevens Center for Innovation, the Light Stage technologies were licensed to OTOY, a Burbank-based company that offers commercial scanning services to the motion picture and interactive entertainment industries.
Timeline
- 2008. Lightstage LLC founded.
- 2009. Lightstage technologies licensed to OTOY.
Inventors
Paul Debevec, Timothy Hawkins