Davis Cup 2007
With the Digital Antics’ ChromaPose solution having covered last summer’s Wimbledon Championships, producing approximately 5000 souvenir images over 2 weeks of customers posing on Centre Court, the LTA were keen to include the green screen booth again in their hall-dominating British Tennis area within Birmingham’s NEC.
Digital Antics were onsite for 5 days covering the entire event from build to close and produced almost 1300 images over the three day event for the fans to take home with the LTA’s compliments. The customers could pose in front of our towering green backdrop and have their full body or close up images composited into a portrait or landscape layout including the court and interacting with Tim Henman or Andy Murray.
As indicated by the numbers, the stand proved extremely popular attracting customers both young and old as well as many groups, all wanting to take away a piece of the action. The time it took to produce an image, from pressing the shutter, through chroma keying the subject and inserting into the selected layout, to printing the final image was barely a minute, enabling hundreds of print outs to be created throughout each day; indeed, at busy periods up to 90 composited images were being processed an hour.
In order to generate interest in the system a 24″ portrait widescreen TFT was positioned just at the entrance to the stand. Throughout the weekend this was used by the system to automatically display a slideshow of all of the composited images created in a random order.
As with previous installations for the LTA, the ChromaPose system was supported by high performance PCs, a professional photography lighting kit and a specially modified Canon EOS DSLR. This latest version of the software featured new GPU pixel shader based image processing, enabling the chroma key mask on the mega-pixel photo to be processed in less than half a second. Prints were created by a Dell colour laser printer and interaction with the system was via controller and public touchscreens; the former to key out the background from the subject and manipulate the final cropped image, the latter to select layout preference and insert the subject’s name.
This customer interaction, ChromaSelect, was a newly implemented part of the system being trialled at the Davis Cup. A 15″ touchscreen stood at the front of the queue displaying a splash screen until activated. The next customer in line could then select their choice of background and enter their details while the previous customer was posing for their picture. Once complete, a foot switch would be toggled by the photographer sending the entered preferences directly to the computer and flagging it as the next shot to be taken.
Digital Antics’ Project Manager for the installation Richard Fish commented:
The stakes had been significantly raised at this show from our previous Wimbledon outing: almost 7,000 people would be streaming into the hall to watch the action on each of the three days and our system needed to run faster and slicker than ever before. On one hand the scale was smaller than last summer’s Wimbledon Championships but the throughput was larger, packing a huge number of images into a smaller timescale. We delivered the goods and can’t wait for the next installment!
The system was operated by the ever enthusiastic Digital Antics’ staff comprising of Andrea Bracher, Jennifer Bracher and Quintin Willison.