The VISTA project is a trial designed to adapt, fine-tune, customise and improve VISIONS, a leading edge Virtual Reality application, towards the advertising industry's needs for authoring storyboards. The VISTA project aims at introducing this new technology in the advertising industry, and evaluating its economic benefits.

While finalising the tool, the VISIONS Consortium has identified a particularly strong professional demand from the advertising industry for using VISIONS to create storyboards. However, this requires adaptation and fine-tuning of the system in order to respond to the demands of the advertising community, which has very specific needs.
Therefore, three partners of the VISIONS Consortium intend to conduct the current VISTA trial which submits the existing VISIONS software to use on specific advertising projects, and feeds back into modifications of the software for sale to that market.

Particular attention will be paid to adding or adapting the following features for real-time operations:

• Sophisticated manipulation of lighting and imitation of lens angles and depth of focus.
• Sophisticated rendering of the images to give required effects - pencil-sketch, water-colour, cartoon, film-noir etc.
• Support of third-party images and models to create sets, props and avatars which match the intentions of the creators.
• Avatars should be capable of hosting photographic face imagery from known artistes. Features for creating avatars' poses must be added.
• Enabling easy revision of any stage without complete re-building.