Virtual Stage: Turn your online events into a unique experience
Virtual events are becoming more and more relevant due to the large number of benefits they have, such as cost savings and travel of speakers; agenda problems when they have to travel to other countries on long-distance trips that cause them to lose days of work, or the elimination of renting large spaces for the realization of events.
Nowadays, a virtual event has nothing to envy to a face-to-face one: audiovisual and technological advances make one of them have the same strength as having the speakers a few meters away from our seat.
Plain Concepts has collaborated with Microsoft Corporation to create a virtual recording studio, which the speakers themselves can use.
Microsoft holds massive events every year, gathering thousands of people in different locations in the United States to showcase their new products to both their customers and partners.
Due to the confinement situation caused by covid-19, the in-person events were cancelled, so, with the MS Build dates approaching, Microsoft needed a solution so that their events would continue to be just as impressive for their audience, but doing it online, without having to move any of their speakers from home, and guaranteeing that the audio and video quality would be up to par.
The process
An application was developed that leveraged the power of Azure Kinect and the latest AI developments that the speakers used, and then simply needed to move into production to add virtual scenarios, backgrounds or presentations.
The Speaker Recorder application captures color and depth information from one or two Azure Kinect cameras. In addition, the speaker can use a presenter to scroll through PowerPoint slides and a wireless microphone.
In Azure, the Background Matting service uses the depth information to generate an imprecise segmentation of the speaker. The backend then separates the background from the speaker, with high precision, and generates a transparent video.
Results
- Thanks to virtual stages, companies can organize and manage online events for their employees or customers in a totally professional way.
- More realistic and closer effects.
- More professional style.
We are ready for new challenges
