I can no longer remain silent on this issue. The vocabulary for videogrammetry is an absolute mess! Today I was reading a Ghost in Shell article about using a new videogrammetry capture setup for vfx, and the supervisor Guillaume Rocheron referenced at least three different names for the technology in one quote. We need to figure out what in the world we are all going to call this tech if we want to ever be able to search for each others’ work online. And fair warning: as a post about words/definitions, there are no pretty pics in this post.



Rocheron said in this article, (bolding is mine)



“It’s a system that has 80 cameras around an actor. It’s what we call motion photogrammetry. We create a volumetric version of those performances. Once we had those in the computer, then we could integrate them into the cityscapes. It’s not just motion capture, where you just try to capture an actor’s movement. We are trying to capture the skin, the hair, the cloth, the performance. So it’s literally a moving 3D scan.”



So here I’ve compiled a list of all the vocabulary I have found to reference this field. I assume for the sake of my argument that 1) lightfields are not what we are referring to, so nothing where you get many perspectives directly, and 2) sequences of 3d models reconstruction directly from recorded data is the basis of a this medium. That means motion capture on a 3d scan is NOT videogrammetry. Everything must be scanned together to create 3d motion reconstruction. It is not necessarily an anti-reflection medium, but currently that is the easiest way to do it at an accessible level.



These are initial thoughts and unrefined, but the conversation needs to start now so we can make progress sooner in unifying our knowledge. So without further ado…



The List:

A quick caveat: 360 video is a phrase that has transformed based around public acceptance of omnidirectional video as “360” which, while not 100% wrong, could have been a more accurate phrase. But the usefulness of an accessible phrase is, in my opinion, more useful than an accurate phrase that limits more people from using it. In this case at least, I believe that holds true. So recently I have begun to use Holograms as the phrase to define my work simply because it is more helpful to others’ understanding.

This is all just to start this conversation. I started another post that goes deeper on this subject which I hope to finish and post soon, but for now just having all the names I’ve found so far in one spot will help me feel like we can contain and address this issue at least. So please, share this - encourage the conversation, and let me know your thoughts! I started with videogrammetry, then switched to volumetric for a while, and now use holograms as a compromise depending on how public facing it is. But perhaps there is a better solution still.

