ChromaPose at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships
Running continuously for over two weeks the Digital Antics ChromaPose installation at the Lawn Tennis Association’s Play Tennis arena behind Court 13 at the world famous Wimbledon Tennis Championships was hot property.
ChromaPose offered children and adults alike to go home with a free souvenir of their own image digitally superimposed on to the world famous centre court and inserted into the ACE Tennis magazine cover.
The installation utilised the combined power of a specially modified Canon EOS digital SLR camera and Digital Antics’ easy-to-use ChromaPose software which was self-operated by the LTA’s volunteer staff. Young and old operators picked up the software in minutes thanks to the simple touchscreen interface and linear workflow.
Digital Antics’ Managing Director Quintin Willison notes:
With the addition of our new ChromaPose mega pixel edition we have raised the bar enormously on the quality stakes by taking advantage of the crisp, high resolution photos delivered to us by industry acclaimed digital SLR cameras like the Canon EOS 30D as well as the high processing speeds attainable with current PC hardware.
ChromaPose utilises a high quality chromakey (green screen) algorithm which processes the individual pixels of the image in HSV colour space rather than RGB. In addition, we’ve introduced the concept of a multi-stage chromakey which allows us to deal with extremes of light and shadow on the green screen curtain much better. Both of these aspects are expensive in terms of computer processor time but produce superb results.
In comparison, the image compositing with the system is very fast, allowing the operator to flip between scaling and positioning modes quickly and with single touch operation on the touch screen. In the background we use a technique know as MIP mapping to ensure a slick, responsive presentation.
Of course there is always going to be a problem with a certain level of complexity to our software, but in the case of ChromaPose we have introduced a preset management system to allow a ‘know state’ to be recalled at the touch of a button. The user interface is laid out in such a way that the layers of complexity are progressive and, therefore, a less experienced operator does not need to explore every feature of the software. Thus, the initial learning curve is reduced.
The touchscreen allows the user quick and easy access to all aspects of the tailored system, and the step by step graphical user interface incorporates each stage of the process in its own button along the edge of the screen.
Once a photo is taken it is transmitted directly to the two waiting high specification Pentium machines where the operator can reposition, scale and live crop the image to suit the selected background. The system can work with full body shots or simply a head and shoulders shot and the composited image is finally produced from a Dell 5100CN colour laser printer.
This entire process, from image capture to production, takes less than five minutes and has left thousands of Wimbledon Championship goers with a fun memento to take home with them.
See our photo gallery for this job.