James George | Eyebeam

James George is an Emmy-award-winning artist, entrepreneur, and computer scientist. George is CEO and Co-Founder of Scatter, a creative technology company that develops the original volumetric video capture software Depthkit.

George is a pioneer in volumetric video experience creation and software tool development.

Scatter’s product Depthkit is the most widely used tool for creating volumetric video human holograms. First launched as an open-source beta in 2011, Depthkit has enabled tens of thousand of users to create volumetric video. Today, Depthkit serves a vibrant community of global enterprises and creative artists alike. James is the primary inventor of Scatter’s patents granted by the USPTO that represent Depthkit’s foundational intellectual property for volumetric video technology.

George served as Executive Producer for Scatter’s virtual reality title Zero Days VR, which won the first News & Documentary Emmy awarded to a 6DOF Virtual Reality experience. He was nominated for a second Emmy in 2022 for The Changing Same VR, for which he also acted as Executive Producer.

Prior to founding Scatter, James was the first Artist-in-Residence at Microsoft Research in Redmond. He co-directed CLOUDS, the first virtual reality documentary to utilize volumetric video for human holograms. CLOUDS premiered at Sundance New Frontier in 2014, won the Tribeca Storyscapes Award for Transmedia that year, then toured globally before its exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2016.

George coined the term ‘Volumetric Filmmaking’ in his 2016 essay A New Dimension in Filmmaking to distinguish the creative art form from the underlying volumetric video technology. Volumetric filmmaking has been recognized as an important emerging medium by the world’s most influential film festivals, arts organizations, and the largest technology and media companies, including Microsoft, Google, Meta, Intel, WarnerMedia, and Verizon.

Exhibition: Wired Frames (May 11, 2012 – May 17, 2012)

WIRED FRAMES

Curation/Text by Eyebeam Artist-in-Residence James George

Opening reception May 10th, from 6PM-8PM in tandem with performance ofARNO GIL MÜLLER NEUMANN SCHUMACHER.

“We’re surrounded by systems, devices and machineries generating heaps of raw graphic novelty. We built them, we programmed them, we set them loose for a variety of motives, but they do some unexpected and provocative things.” – Bruce Sterling, An Essay on the New Aesthetic Our environment is full of machines interpreting our every gesture. We have video games programmed to judge our dance moves, electronic storefront advertisements that infer our gender, and security cameras that algorithmically deduce our intentions. These automated eyes peer through lenses of code continually attempting to make sense of our world.

What would happen if we cracked open these vision machines to reveal the images ﬂowing through? How does their way of seeing inﬂuence our own self-perception? Their gaze is strange and unsettling, yet we recognize ourselves within it. We appear distorted, somehow alien and uncanny–as if we’ve stumbled into a funhouse hall of mirrors, confronted with reﬂections at once foreign and familiar, virtual and real. Lines and dots overlay our faces and ﬁgures, a new type of tribal mask depicting our body’s interface to computational logic. These digital depictions speak to our contemporary existence as half virtual/half analog beings, and have inspired a group of artist-technologists to explore their potential.

WIRED FRAMES brings together artists who engage with machine perception to explore the humanistic, expressive, and creative potential of this mode of representation. The artists have taken up the subject of portraiture, exploring a new vanguard of the age-old genre. Both the viewers and the machines are responding to these portraits, following instinctual tendencies to look for facial patterns, to ﬁnd the human within the ﬁeld of view.

Participating artists include: Arturo Castro, James George, Kyle McDonald, Jonathan Minard, and Alexander Porter.

Eyebeam Project: RGBDToolkit (2012)

James George, Nick Fox-Gieg, Jonathan Minard

The RGBDToolkit is an open source platform for volumetric filmmaking that utilizes a hacked Kinect depth sensor paired with a DSLR video camera to creates a unique hybrid form of three dimensional video. The toolkit allows experimentation with a new paradigm of filmmaking where 3D models derived from large image datasets allow for choosing perspectives after the fact, merging photography and 3D animation. The RGB+D tumblr (http://rgbd.tumblr.com) showcases on going research from the artists developing the software while they create their work.

The RGB+D Kit Evolved into the DepthKit.