How WePlay Studios is Transforming the Future of Live Eve...

By 2032, the esports market is expected to grow to $9.29 billion, bolstered by a global player count and fan following that both continue to climb. The 2023 League of Legends World Championship Tournament alone drew in an audience of over 6.4 million. Considering esports' massive fan following, many of whom tune in via dedicated live streams, the pressure to deliver high-end live productions that align with fan expectations is real for companies like WePlay Studios. With dual headquarters in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Los Angeles, California, the award-winning content production company fuses gaming, technology from companies like AJA Video Systems, and storytelling to craft second-to-none gaming shows and esports tournament experiences for top-rated titles like Dota 2, CS:GO, Valorant, and Rocket League. But, as WePlay has uncovered, there's also a huge demand for its talents on live event productions like The VTuber Awards, which its team completed a full virtual production for last year.

Hosted by Filian in partnership with talent management agency Mythic Talent, the five-hour event celebrated the top virtual creators online. WePlay Studios helped bring the event to audiences worldwide with a virtual broadcast by blending physical production facilities and equipment with extensive virtual production engineering and design. Storytelling and technological innovation drive every show we do, and we pride ourselves on creating iconic content that leaves a lasting viewer impression; the VTuber Awards were no exception, shared Head of Virtual Production Aleksii Gutiantov. While we'd previously incorporated AR into live esports productions, this show marked our first foray into a fully virtual event managed with virtual cues; it's the most challenging technological endeavor we've ever taken on.

Linking physical and virtual environments

To successfully pull off the event, Gutiantov managed and coordinated the production in Los Angeles remotely from his laptop from Europe, using intercom communication with over 16 team members and orchestrating eight days of non-stop pre-production to deliver the broadcast. His team first created a real-time rendering of an entirely virtual Filian to incorporate into the live production using motion capture (mocap) technology. They tapped 20 witness cameras for comprehensive, full-body performance capture, including precise finger movements, and combined it with additional technology to stream facial mocap data.

The live event stream included a vast virtual arena, but Filian s character was located on a smaller stage, encircled by a digitally reconstructed version of WePlay s physical LA arena. To ensure every physical pan, tilt, and focus pull translated directly into the virtual render environment, WePlay Studios' camera operators managed three cameras that were synced to virtual cameras. Camera operators in the practical/physical set were then able to switch among various angles within the virtual stadium using iPads connected to virtual cameras, creating the illusion of using a dozen cameras instead of three.

To make the production look more authentic, WePlay Studios connected the physical stage lights to the corresponding virtual lights, which allowed the team to manipulate the virtual stadium s lighting environment through the activation of a real environment via a lighting control console. Video playback was also integrated into the virtual world, with software for live event visuals connected to the virtual venue used to launch and control the graphics displayed on the virtual stage s screens. AJA KONA 5 video I/O boards played a crucial role in the 12G-SDI signal chain, and the final SDI feed was forwarded to an AJA KUMO 3232-12G video router for availability across the entire broadcast pipeline.

Our KONA 5 cards were instrumental in allowing us to receive 12G-SDI signals, integrate them into an Unreal Engine 5 environment, and composite the final in SDI. It's the best product on the market, explained Gutiantov. And, our KUMO routers let us build infrastructure for large remote and on-site productions like this one and manage everything from a single, convenient web interface thousands of kilometers away. We also love that we can save pre-programmed salvo routing configurations for SDI signals, and we never have to worry about them going down; I ve been working with them since 2017 on various projects, and they ve never failed me.

Leveraging KONA 5 with Unreal Engine

KONA 5 enabled WePlay Studios' team to leverage the power of Unreal Engine to create a comprehensive virtual production hub capable of handling 12G-SDI workflows. This allowed them to fully harness the potential of AR technology, from camera tracking to motion capture and data-driven graphics, while ensuring flawless live virtual production broadcasts without any technical mishaps in compositing. It also allowed them to produce UltraHD fill and key signals from one card in all known formats, using Pixotope as a keyer for 4K with the failover features known from FHD workflows.

The KONA 5 user interface is simple enough to understand and control, even amidst the pressures of live production, and we love that we can preview last-minute changes in real time. It also offers up to four reconfigurable I/Os, from SD to 4K, along with support for AES/EBU, LTC, RS-422/GPI, which is key for transforming video from interlaced to progressive formats if we are working in Saudi Arabia or China, added Gutiantov. KONA 5 really helps accelerate operations on projects like this, which requires a lot of compute power for motion-adaptive deinterlacing. Furthermore, the card's multi-channel hardware processing accelerated compute-intensive operations so that we could combine multiple video sources into a single output in Unreal Engine 5, up/down/cross-scale, and mi

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