National Lab Facilities

The Stage will be a collaborative space where academic researchers and industry partners can test, trial and refine new approaches to media production across film, television, live performance, immersive media and gaming.

A core objective is to de-risk experimentation and accelerate innovation in converged media by reducing technical and commercial barriers for creative businesses. The studio environment has been designed to be modular and reconfigurable, supporting different production formats and creative applications within the same space, and enabling iterative R&D as technologies and sector needs evolve.

The Stage will also function as an industry-facing demonstration and testing environment, strengthening collaboration between academia and the creative technology sector and supporting iterative development of commercial applications.

Summary of CoSTAR Lab Technologies:

• Visual display: LED and projection systems for flexible, reconfigurable environments.
• Rigging and infrastructure: trussing and motorised rigging to support rapid studio reconfiguration.
• Spatial audio: integrated capabilities for immersive production and performance workflows.
• Tracking and monitoring: camera and motion tracking plus system monitoring for R&D-grade testing.
• IP media network: a next-generation ST-2110 backbone enabling entirely IP-based transport of video, audio and timing signals.
• Real-time control: Disguise systems supporting real-time outputs to the LED and projector environment, with high-bandwidth networking to capture multiple video and audio streams simultaneously.

The Futures Studio at Royal Holloway, University of London is a research and development facility dedicated to advancing virtual production, immersive media and next-generation audio technologies for the creative industries.

As part of the CoSTAR National Lab’s facilities, the studio provides a collaborative space where researchers, students and industry partners can experiment with tools such as LED-volume virtual production, real-time rendering and spatial audio to develop new forms of storytelling and media production.

The Futures Studio also serves as a testbed for a major new facility - the CoSTAR Stage at Pinewood Studios, which will be led by the same team and will bring large-scale virtual production and creative-technology R&D directly into one of the world’s leading film studio environments.

The Futures Studio was jointly funded by Royal Holloway, University of London and Surrey County Council.

The Futures Studio is a prototyping facility offers the following core production and research capabilities:

• LED volume-based virtual production for real-time environments and in-camera backgrounds
• Real-time Unreal Engine pipelines for interactive scene rendering and virtual environments
• Camera tracking and in-camera VFX enabling parallax-correct imagery on LED walls
• High-end cinema camera capture with professional cinema cameras, lenses, and motion rigs
• Immersive and spatial audio production, including multichannel playback and recording
• XR and mixed-reality experimentation using VR/AR headsets and 3D scanning tools
• Live performance and music production in an acoustically treated studio environment 

These capabilities are supported by a dedicated LED virtual production stage, camera tracking systems, high-performance rendering servers, immersive audio infrastructure and XR capture tools, enabling small-to-medium scale film, television, music and immersive media productions.