Sony rebuilt Goodwood’s famous Tyrrell Shed with a camera and a phone

The shed they sat in was a 3D scan played on a large LED screen. The cars seemingly beside them had never really been there. Sony calls this witchcraft XYN, pronounced 'zin', the film industry calls it 'virtual production'.

"We're using digital twins of famous locations and famous racing cars to project those onto an LED screen and capture them through the camera as if they were physically here," said Elliot Marris at Sony Europe.

Until recently, a scan like that meant specialist rigs, computers costing tens of thousands and the skills to drive them. Sony built this one with a camera and a phone. But why bother, and why not just use a green screen?

Green with envy

You have seen it a thousand times. A weather presenter waves at a map that isn't behind them. An actor dangles off a building nobody built. What is really there is a blank wall painted bright green. Software hunts down every green pixel and makes it transparent, so only the person is left.  

Slide a new background in behind them, and the job is done. The industry calls it chroma key, but it only works if the software can tell exactly where the person stops and the scene starts. That's hard with strands of hair, and harder still around glasses. Worse, green light bounces off the wall onto whoever stands in front of it, so a faint green tinge lands on skin and hair, and the software can delete that too.

"For people who wear glasses, or on hot days where you've got people with a little bit of a shine to them, the green screen way of working is difficult because you have to remove that green afterwards," said Marris, all while the actor is standing in an empty green box, reacting to nothing.

Sony's answer is to throw the green wall away and put the room itself on the screen instead. There is no green, so nothing to delete and nothing for the software to get wrong. The background is really there, filmed at the same moment as the person, and the screen throws light onto their face, glasses and hair, so the reflections are accurate.

"Actors or presenters can be much more immersed in these virtual worlds they're supposed to be performing in," Marris said. Big productions have switched for the simple reason "you can't send your actors to outer space, generally speaking."

Rather than killing off the green screen completely, XYN tech can be used with it, as well as for virtual reality and virtual productions such as video games, leaving productions to choose shot by shot.

A camera, a phone and the cloud

So, how did Sony get an entire building inside a computer? The answer is in what a camera and phone already capture. A Sony Alpha camera records far more detail than a photograph uses, and an iPhone app reads the scene alongside it. "We can combine some information from the iPhone and some information from the camera sensor," Marris explained.  

Both go to Sony's cloud and come back processed. "Within a couple of hours, you've got a really high-fidelity 3D model." The heavy computing happens on Sony's machines, not yours. "The same cameras you would take on vacation or walk around with here at the Festival of Speed to take pictures of cars, are the same cameras you can now use to capture these environments," he said.

Why it matters

“This XYN family of technologies isn't exclusive to just film production," Marris said. "Once you have those digital twins, you can use those in as many ways as you can think of. A school trip to the pyramids could be expensive and difficult to do. Scanning that location allows you to access it and experience that in a very different way." The same file works in a headset, on a projection wall or in a video game.

The barrier was never the idea, it was the price, accessibility of the equipment and time spent learning to use it. "These cameras are attainable, phones are attainable," Marris said. "If you're younger or if you just want to experiment with 3D modelling or creating virtual worlds, you no longer need to worry about the huge expense in both the cost of the hardware, but also the cost of the knowledge to do this stuff."

This clarion call to content creators shows Sony did not scan the Tyrrell Shed to simply show it could be done, they did it to show anyone with a camera, a phone and a bit of imagination has the same power as Hollywood to do the same.

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Photography by Joe Harding, Charlie Brenninmeijer and Jack Beasley.