A real-time camera capture plugin developed in response to a live industry brief set by SimCentric — a UK-based simulation software company — as part of a university-wide faculty project. SimCentric briefed student teams across the design faculty, liaised during development, and received a final presentation. Four other companies set briefs alongside SimCentric; this was the chosen brief.

The brief centred on wildlife crime scene investigation, requiring tooling that could operate inside a live simulation environment — capturing camera frames at runtime, attaching structured metadata, and feeding that data into downstream detection or analysis systems.

 

My Role

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Core plugin development — implementing the real-time capture functionality, building the metadata logging system, and integrating the object detection workflows. Also responsible for integration testing across capture and metadata pipelines, identifying and resolving edge case behaviours affecting timing accuracy and data integrity.

The project was delivered by a team of approximately ten students, each with a defined role. My responsibility was the core plugin development.

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Key Features

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• Real-time image capture from within a live Unreal Engine session

• Structured metadata logging including timestamps and coordinate data

• Object detection workflow integration

• Designed to operate without interrupting simulation execution

• Focus on system integration, runtime performance, and reliability

 

Unreal Engine 5 Blueprints Real-Time Systems Metadata Logging Object Detection GitHub Agile Work in Progress

 

University project completed. Active development ongoing — current focus on improving detection accuracy and expanding metadata output fields.