High-ranking visit from Minister Nathanael Liminski at the start of the summer break. As the Minister responsible for Federal and European Affairs, International Affairs and Media, the Head of the State Chancellery visited the company LAVAlabs Moving Images and the MIREVI laboratory at HSD on Ackerstrasse. The occasion was the personal handover of the funding decision for the AVASTARS research project, with which the two partners LAVAlabs and HSD were able to successfully prevail against 70 competitors in the first EFRE funding call next.in.nrw. In the project, which is funded with 1.5 million euros, the two partners want to develop AI technologies that can be used for the rapid pre-visualization of avatars in film production. There is a great need here to support “virtual production”, i.e. the production of film scenes with large high-resolution LED walls instead of real film settings on location, in the early stages of film productions such as Mandalorian. This can contribute significantly to cost savings. The central tasks in AVASTARS are an AI-based process to automatically generate initial 3D visualizations from a textual script using a game engine such as Unreal and to quickly adapt the behavior of 3D avatars to the requirements of the film production process.
Minister Liminski also used the visit to find out about the 10-year collaboration between the MIREVI laboratory and the companies LAVAlabs and Tennagels Medientechnik, which are based there. He was particularly impressed by the special opportunities offered by the joint work of media companies and research teams in one place and the diverse possibilities that have arisen from this. This joint project was launched in 2015 with the support of the NRW project WICKIE, which was advertised in the predecessor program “Leitmarkt CreateMedia”.
“We are very excited that we were also successful with our AVASTARS project in the first call of the new next.in.nrw funding line and can therefore continue our joint work,” said Christian Geiger, Head of the MIREVI laboratory at HSD, and Michael Brink / Rolf Mütze, Managing Directors of LAVAlabs Moving Images GmbH, who were particularly pleased about the personal presentation of the decision by Minister Liminski.
During the one-hour visit, the project partners showed the Minister and his team, as well as representatives of the project sponsor Jülich, the special premises on Ackerstrasse and presented a selection of numerous projects from the last 10 years. Nathanael Liminski took the opportunity to try out a current media installation himself in front of a large LED wall, where he was able to interact with others as an abstract avatar.
