In 2005 there were no personalised online videos of the kind you see on facebook today. With hindsight, you might say the world was a richer place for it. At HP Labs we were looking at ways to promote opportunities for the cloud based utility rendering service we had built previously. A small team of us first conceptualised and then built a proof of concept for this web service that could take consumer photos/videos/text etc. uploaded by users in to a web form, and render them in to a purpose built 3D animation.
At the time we said : “Consumers are accumulating a large amount of content that, after the initial acquisition, is rarely reviewed or reused. For example, large digital photo libraries are commonplace but only a small fraction of those photos are ever viewed more than once and/or printed. At the same time, film and TV studios are facing similar challenges to the music industry in convincing their traditional consumers to obtain copyrighted material through legal channels. Much attention has been focused on methods to protect copyright and restrict illegal copying and distribution. One area that we believe has not been fully explored is to find new and engaging ways to convince consumers that copyrighted materials should be purchased legally. In addition, media players are now in the home, at work and mobile causing consumers to increasingly demand content that is not bound to any particular platform or format.
For these reasons, we have been exploring the reuse of a user’s existing content combined with the capture of new application-specific content and existing third-party content to produce personalised experiences suitable for consumption in a variety of ways. The ring-tone market growth is a good indicator of the consumer desire to personalise.”
Here is an example of one of the early outputs from the service, the ‘Lets Do Amazing’ HP marketing material was the personalised content added to the video template, but it could have been a family photograph, something you did on holiday, your cat, etc.
It gained a lot of attention and we produced a few more 3D templates so that we could test the service out at scale internally at HP with employees being invited to make videos for friends and family members. This video was produced by Dan Lane for a company event in Texas. Your uploaded material would be placed on the easel which gets lasso’d.
And finally this one, where your content is rendered on to the playing cards. So when you see those lovely automatic movies for birthdays and ‘your year in review’, this was where it all started!