Innovative CG content production through advanced APE

Abstract

We have been conducting research and development on a new system called TV for you (TV4U), for production, distribution and viewing of video content on the Internet. With TV4U, ordinary users with no special skills are able to produce and publish video content based on real-time 3D computer graphics (CG), and these can be viewed easily by anyone. TV4U makes use of a mechanism we have devised, called Automatic Production Engine (APE), which involve templates for automatically generating production direction for video content. Through introduction of APE, produced video content can be created easily, even by ordinary users with no special skills, by writing a simple description of a scenario. So far, APE have only been capable of generating productions within the range of predefined templates already in the system, limiting the video content that can be produced. As such, we have devised a mechanism able to generate production direction according to the current conditions in the video content. Introducing this mechanism into APE has made it more sophisticated, and has allowed APE to generate sophisticated production direction for video content that was not possible with previous versions of APE.