Public Funding for Tractive Ltd

Virtual production involves the use of huge LED walls to project scenes around actors, and was pioneered in the 2019 Disney TV series "Star Wars: The Mandalorian". Since then, the global market for virtual production has grown to $1.82bn in 2022, and is projected to double by 2027\. This project tackles one of the greatest inefficiencies in virtual production today: creating photorealistic 3D scenes. Currently, creating a 3D scene requires painstaking manual effort to construct detailed 3D models and apply realistic colours, textures and lighting. It can take a professional 3D artist many weeks to produce a single object, let alone an entire scene. This £50k project will demonstrate a method to automatically turn a set of 100 digital photos into a full 3D scene, ready for use in virtual production, at the touch of a button. Access to low-cost, high quality 3D scenes will enable filmmakers to cut down on expensive international travel and shoot more scenes in the studio, on virtual production stages. Widely adopted, this technology has the potential to produce film scenes at a fraction of the current cost and time, putting the UK at the forefront of the $220bn global TV and film production industry.