2008 P&G VR Shoppable Shelf Project

This project involved the complete 3D re-creation of a Proctor & Gamble research store (not open to the public) and the stocking of one and a half isles with 3D scanned products. Each of these images is a real-time screenshot of the 3D store application smoothly running on a mid-range 2008 laptop. The 3D development environment used was Dessault's Virtools, which the customer was already using for their experimental VR setups.

My involvement was in re-creating the complete store by hand from a comprehensive set of on-site photographs taken by me. Photographs of products in isles that were not scanned in 3D had to be stitched together from reference photographs by myself and other members of the team. So that they could be presented as billboards on the shelves.

All 3D products were scanned using a 2-camera setup for photogrammetric processing into high-resolution 3D models. Using a script that I wrote in 3D Studio Max, the scanning operators were able to interactively decimate the high resolution models into 200-300 polygon models and have the textures automatically reprojected in 2 minutes or less. Helping us establish a photography to final model pipeline of just 10 minutes per product.

Stocking of the shelves with 3D products was done entirely by me using 3D Studio MaxScripts that could read in .CSV files for automatic positioning and instance duplication.

Finally, I was also responsible for writing the Cg/HLSL shaders that mixed multiple pre-rendered light maps together to give the final lighting a natural, diffused look without requiring that the hundreds of lights involved be rendered per-frame.

FYI: The relatively low resolution of the light maps and textures was due to an arbitrary Virtools memory limit of 1GB for art assets. Given a different development environment, we could have not only increased the map resolutions, but added a radiosity light map layer that would have increased the realism even more.