The Briefing Room

Aguru Images, a provider of innovative image capture devices, is proud to announce the launch of the Aguru Dome™ 2 targeting world leading visual effects, game development and motion capture service facilities. The Aguru Dome 2 will be on display in the Aguru Images Booth (# 347) throughout the SIGGRAPH Conference, August 12-14, 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

The Aguru Dome™ offers the very highest performance in shape and material property measurement for true-to-life computer generated digital doubles and other real world materials. Aguru Dome 1 is a production proven solution having been used on the sets of blockbuster films for measurement of faces, heads and many other objects for digital reproduction of actors and materials.

The Aguru Dome is based on the Light Stage technology originally developed by Paul Debevec and his group at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, who worked closely with Aguru Images engineers on this latest commercial release of the imaging solution. The Aguru Dome 2 brings a number of additional workflow improvements to the previous version, and is the first product of its kind being made commercially available to facilities worldwide.

The Aguru Dome 2 offers a 300X improvement in shape measurement resolution when compared with the quality of data that is considered standard in the industry today. Moreover, the Aguru Dome 2 automatically derives a host of additional detailed information from a performer or scanned object, including diffuse, specular, RGB diffuse normal, and specular normal maps for more accurate digital depictions.

“We’ve had a fantastic response to the Dome technology which offers unprecedented precision and an enabling solution to a very hard, but very common problem in visual effects and game development—creating accurate digital doubles,” explained Craig Miller, Aguru Images’ CEO. “Due to increasing demands to make the technology available worldwide, we packaged the Dome 2 with several improvements in both software and hardware design and focused diligently on our customer’s requirements. Offering the Aguru Dome 2 for immediate installation will enable the world’s VFX experts to create even more lifelike computer generated characters and objects than ever before, but with a level of automation that most have only dreamed of.”

The Aguru Dome 2 is shipping in September of 2008 and will be supported by technicians based in Los Angeles, CA and in Rockville, Maryland.

About Aguru Images

Aguru Images was founded in 2006 to commercialize and market innovative image capture devices developed at and licensed from USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and NYU’s Courant Institute. The company’s advanced capture technologies reduce the time, cost and complexity required to develop photo-real computer generated recreations of people and objects for use in film, game, animation, multimedia and design industries. Aguru Images has offices in Rockville, Maryland with a satellite office in Los Angeles, CA. For more information, please visit www.aguruimages.com or write to doubles@aguruimages.com.