Matthieu Labeau, Sales manager, introduces Nozon based in Brussels.
What are your company’s skills?
Nozon is a Post-Production facility delivering High-Quality Visual Effects and 3D animation since 1998.
The company is based in Belgium with offices both in Brussels and Liège
Nozon also owns shares in a twin French company: Nozon Paris SAS.
More than half of the gross revenue is coming from abroad.
Clients worldwide trusts Nozon to achieve complex Visual Effects and 3D animation. Nozon worked on TV and Movie Theater advertising campaigns for major brands like Coca-Cola, Pontiac, BMW, Danone, Total,Shell, …
Nozon also worked on two Major Animated Features films:
- Minuscule : which won many prizes including the 2015 Best Animated Movie Cesar.
- Asterix “Le Domaine des Dieux”
For some sample of Nozon work, feel free to visit: www.nozon.com
Nozon headcount varies between 15 and 60 depending on project load. The turnover for the three past years varied between 2.2 and 3.7 Million euros.
Nozon has always been strong on R&D and developing since it’s creation many in-house tools ( programs, scripts and plug-ins and some physical devices ) to achieve stunning visual results.
Tristan Salomé: The main inventor behind PresenZ is Tristan Salomé.
Born 1969, he graduated from the ULB ( Brussels University ) in 1993, first of his promotion as a Biochemical Engineer specialized in Artificial Intelligence.
Before founding Nozon, he worked as a researcher:
- at Brussels University Artificial Intelligence ( A.I. ) department: IRIDIA
- at Tractebel Energy Engineering applying A.I. to the forecast of Belgian National Electrical Load.
- at Tractebel in the field of Virtual Reality applied to industrial surveys.
- for his own company developing autostereo graphics imagery and an Augmented Reality Prototype in 1998.
Tell us about one of your the emblematic accomplishments?
Crédit Nozon
As explained before Nozon took part in creating Minuscule and Asterix.
On the Virtual Reality side, we developed a working system, unique in the world that enables parallax in pre-rendered 360 movie
Introduction to PresenZ:
- PresenZ is a patent pending revolutionary technology for VR movies.
- It is the only working system allowing interactive parallax in pre-rendered CG Movie. The user can move his head comfortably while watching the movie without getting any cybersickness.
- The result is an incredible image quality with a complete immersion feeling.
- The system can use any Virtual or Augmented Reality Headset like the Oculus Rift or the Microsoft HoloLens for instance or even CAVE systems with headtracking.
Differences with existing systems:
The two other methods used so far for Virtual Movies are:
- The use of real-time game engines:
A 3D video game similar to the ones found on the PlayStation 4 is used. This technique allows for parallax and positional tracking, so the immersion comfort is good but it is severely limited in terms of scene complexity and image quality because the game engine must compute about 150 images per second
- “Standard” 360° “Movies:
Here the image quality is very good because the images can be live captured or pre-computed during several hours per frame. But the immersion feeling is not convincing. That’s because 360° Movies are taken from a single point of view, so they cannot support parallax. When the user shifts his head, the perspective doesn’t change, that breaks the immersion feeling and quickly brings discomfort and cybersickness
| Immersion Quality | Image Quality | |
| Real-Time game engines | Good | Bad |
| Standard 360° Movies | Bad | Good |
| PresenZ | Good | Good |
PresenZ’s Benefits:
- PresenZ brings the best of both worlds: the image quality of blockbuster movies with a perfect immersion feeling.
- The different assets used to create a movie, like CGI ( Computer Generated Imagery ) sets or characters, can be re-used directly. With PresenZ, there is no need to convert any asset or to change anything in the existing CG filmmaking pipeline.
Objective: become the Immersive Movie standard format:
Our PresenZ technology really enables to taste the ultimate immersive movie experience. That is as we stated before because we have the quality of a block-buster pre-rendered movie, with a perfect immersion feeling.
What is your next stage of your development?
- Create a compression format for our system so that content can be downloaded or bought on a bluray disk. That will bring down the cost of the player system and also lift the 15 minutes limit;
- Add 3D Spatialized sound;
- Add support for other rendering engines like VRay to extend the number of other VFX studios able to license our system.
J’ai une formation technique et je suis passionné par les nouvelles technologies et tout ce qui s’en approche.
Aujourd’hui je participe,à l’animation du blog http://augmented-reality.fr. En 2011, nous avons créé avec Gregory Maubon, l’association de promotion de la réalité augmentée RA’pro dont je suis le président. Dans le cadre des activités de RA’pro, je co-organise les ARuseCamp (http://ARuseCamp.org) et j'interviens pour des conférences, des ateliers ou du conseil et de l'accompagnement.
Vous pouvez me joindre à cette adresse olivier@augmented-reality.fr ou via skype olivier.schimpf