The Technology Behind Spotlight Stories
The idea of Spotlight Stories came from a desire to channel the full capabilities of our phones into something creative and beautiful. Current smartphones have an incredible amount of power, including graphics processing. In many ways, today’s smartphones outperform computers from a decade ago. But they also have sensors that computers don’t have: a gyroscope, a compass, an accelerometer, GPS, etc. And they’re much smaller. Yet, as personal as our phones are, we have a pretty limited relationship with them. We think of them as communication devices, making us better at dealing with the stuff around us, but there is a whole other aspect to human interaction that is deeply emotional. Stories are one of the fundamental ways in which we communicate emotion, from children’s books, to camp fires, movies, and tv shows. What we wanted to do was to challenge our phones; to see if we could pair the deeply human with the deeply technical and create stories made specifically for the mobile medium.
The Motorola Spotlight Player renders a virtual world that you can explore just as you would the real one. To put you in this world, Spotlight Player uses and combines data from the gyro, accelerometer, and compass sensors in real time. This act of combining this data needs to be super-smooth to sell the idea that you are holding a handheld camera in a make-believe world. To simulate the camera you’re holding, we adapted a sensor fusion algorithm, based on technology developed for precision planetary landings.
We’ve got some of the best in the animation business to imagine that world and the characters in it but what happens behind the scenes amazes even us sometimes.
Windy Day, the first Spotlight Story, proved that we can use smartphones to create fully-formed, immersive, three dimensional interactive worlds. To get the smooth, organic shapes of the characters we utilized a Pixar technology known as “subdivision surfaces,” which give animators much more control over the quality of the characters on-screen. Pixar has used this technology successfully in all their movies since Bug’s Life and recently open-sourced it as OpenSubdiv. Previously only used for feature-film production, our engineers, in collaboration with Pixar and Qualcomm, brought this technology to a mobile application for the first time running on the Moto X at 60 frames per second.
With Pixar’s OpenSubdiv, our artists get the simplicity of working and refining a low-polygon model while getting organic and smooth shapes in the final rendered model. It also lets us do much higher fidelity animations on the characters in real-time. Here is an example of one of the characters from an upcoming Story before and after subdivision is applied.
While the creatives have been hard at work on the next Story, we’ve also been working to improve some of the tech behind the scenes. Spotlight Player now supports dynamic per-pixel lighting and post processing effects that are going to be a big part of the next Story. For those of you who have upgraded to Android 4.4/Kitkat on your Moto X phones, Spotlight Player is one of the first experiences that will utilize OpenGL-ES 3.0. This has allowed us to make even more efficient usage of the graphics processor by offloading work from the CPU, improving overall performance.
We’re excited to keep pushing boundaries of how tech and creativity can come together on a mobile platform. As new Spotlight Stories come out, stay tuned for more behind the scenes.
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