Google's Seurat technology turned a film-quality Rogue One scene into mobile VR
Google has a new tool called Seurat that's designed to take high-end, film-quality 3D scenes and turn them into something that can run on mobile hardware. To demonstrate the technology, Google partnered with IMXLAB at Lucasfilm to take a high-fidelity digital set from Rogue One, which originally took hours per frame to render, and compressed the polygons and textures into something that could run in realtime on its prototype WorldSense headset.
We got to check out a demo, and it did indeed look great. The scene — a dark and foreboding Imperial Hangar — has realtime reflections and lighting effects, along with a looming, animated K-2. It's not exactly cinema quality, but it's better than what you'd normally see running on mobile hardware...