XReco Platform and RAI News Media Demonstrator

摘要

The evolving media landscape increasingly demands immersive, non-linear formats supported by innovative tools for content creation and distribution. The Horizon Europe XReco project addresses this need by providing a unified, data-driven ecosystem for next-generation media production, with a focus on extended reality (XR) and virtual production. The platform integrates ingestion of diverse media types (text, images, audio, video, 3D), cross-modal search, 3D content creation, sharing, and monetization. Central to XReco is a metadata-driven ingestion system that overcomes archive fragmentation by enabling efficient organization and access to content from sources like broadcasters, online news, and open repositories. This capability was demonstrated through a short TV documentary on Guglielmo Marconi, created using historical materials assembled via the XReco platform. The platform's Orchestrator module empowers users with powerful cross-modal semantic search capabilities, leveraging neural descriptors to enable queries across different media formats. Editorial teams can retrieve relevant contents searching by keywords like ''telegraph'' or perform reverse image searches to identify and contextualize visual assets like images and 3D models. This unified search functionality significantly enhances content discovery and reuse. A major innovation of the platform consists in providing a set of tools for enhancing the quality of the ingested contents, as well as generating 3D models from 2D assets using state-of-the-art techniques (video super resolution, blind face restoration, NeRF, Gaussian Splatting, Structure from Motion). These services are accessible and tunable via a unified interface, which provides a streamlined user experience and hides the complexity of the underlying technologies. For the Marconi documentary, detailed 3D models of key technological artifacts were created, enabling viewers to interactively explore these objects from multiple perspectives. XReco also supports seamless integration with third-party tools to enrich production workflows. Our documentary incorporated photorealistic digital avatars created with Unreal MetaHuman, animated via motion capture, and featured holoported human experts alongside real presenters within dynamic virtual environments. A noteworthy example is the virtual reconstruction of the RAI Radio Museum in Turin based on Gaussian Splatting, in which avatars from remote locations are developed with Unity and rendered using 4D Gaussian Splatting and Free Viewpoint Video (FVV) technologies. Compatibility with platforms such as Unity and Unreal Engine further facilitates the creation of visually compelling XR experiences. In summary, the XReco platform represents a robust end-to-end solution that effectively tackles the technical and commercial complexities of modern XR and virtual production, paving the way for innovative storytelling in the evolving media ecosystem. During the demo, attendees will have a walkthrough of the platform functionalities, highlighting key technologies for content search, filtering, and processing. They will also be able to enjoy a short documentary about Guglielmo Marconi, produced by our editorial team using XReco technology. After the walkthrough, attendees will have the opportunity to interact directly with the XReco platform to explore its features hands-on-such as testing the search capabilities, creating 3D assets, and experimenting with other available tools. This will provide a more engaging and comprehensive experience of the demo's functionalities. Link to the video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/15XTkg-x1U62hQ2dRo2ABiT3LG94CJXO5