Spatial Control Room is a Mixed Reality (MR) application for use in Production Control Rooms (PCR), which are mainly found in live television productions. The focus was on developing an alternative to conventional vision mixers and monitor walls.
Spatial Control Room has been shortlisted for the XRC nextreality.contest 2024 and I would be happy to get a vote for the Community Award!
Voting is possible without registration: https://nextrealitycontest.de/de/community-award-voting/
The idea for the project came to me when I was working on a production myself. I realised that although Augmented Reality (AR) and similar technologies are already being used in film and television, for example to add virtual backgrounds or additional information in sports, immersive technologies are mainly being used as a medium and not as a tool for actual content creation. I wanted to see if the existing processes in a production control room could be improved and optimised through the use of Extended Reality (XR). Spatial Control Room is a Meta Quest3 application that connects to a computer running OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) and allows 10 individual scenes to be streamed to the headset simultaneously, along with the preview and program bus. I developed this prototype using Unity, Meta’s XR All-in-One SDK, Flexalon Pro by Virtual Maker and a NDI Plugin by Keijiro Takahashi. For prototyping I used Blender, Figma and ShapesXR.
While there are still many improvements to be made for professional use in the broadcast industry, Spatial Control Room demonstrates the potential of extended reality beyond the usual gaming and training scenarios.
Spatial Control Room is the final project for my interface design studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam, which I completed with a grade of 1.0 (excellent). You can read my complete bachelor thesis (in German language) as a PDF file here:
With a little technical understanding, you can try out Spatial Control Room yourself.
You can find instructions on GitHub.