Real-time Digital Acting for Transmedia Production

Actors will soon perform together in real time as digital characters, with their facial expressions and body movements captured simultaneously and translated instantly into virtual avatars for films, games, and theme parks. This project tackles a technical bottleneck: current motion-capture systems cannot easily synchronise multiple actors’ faces and bodies at once, limiting collaborative digital performances. Industrial Light & Magic, Disney Research UK, and the Oxford-based motion-capture company Vicon are building an extensible framework that combines face and body capture into a single, real-time pipeline. If successful, the framework will let directors see fully rendered digital characters interacting live on set, rather than waiting weeks for post-production. For audiences, this means more lifelike and emotionally convincing digital actors in blockbuster films, video games, and immersive attractions. The technology will be commercialised by Vicon, making it available to studios worldwide. The project does not address climate or environmental issues—despite the category label—but focuses squarely on advancing entertainment production.