costar screen lab: spatial audio in virtual production
CoSTAR Screen Lab invites companies, technologists, and creatives to explore innovative applications of spatial audio to enhance audience interaction with visual assets in virtual production.
Virtual Production (VP) has rapidly transformed film, broadcast, live performance, simulation, and immersive media through real-time engines, LED volumes, motion capture, and digital twins. However, interaction with visual assets in VP environments remains predominantly screen-centric and visually mediated, presenting challenges in two key areas:
For human talent in productions where interaction with digital assets is essential.
For audiences navigating complex 3D environments on screen or in live performances or installations.
Spatial audio, the dynamic placement and movement of sound in three-dimensional space, offers an under-explored modality for navigating, manipulating, and understanding visual assets in VP environments. By turning sound into an interaction layer, spatial audio can:
Enhance situational awareness in complex real-time scenes.
Create new creative grammars between sound, space, and image.
This call asks: how can spatialised audio become an interaction layer that lets audiences or human talent discover, navigate, influence, and meaningfully engage with visual assets during production or live/hybrid digital performances?
Rather than treating sound as accompaniment, this R&D challenge positions 3D audio as a guide, affordance, and feedback system that enables audiences and human talent to interact with visual worlds more intuitively, accessibly, and collectively.