Augmenting the biggest Live Events with Unreal was my Unreal Fest 2025 talk. If you missed it then your in luck cause i'm going to be detailing the whole speach right here.

Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul was one of the most watched boxing events in history and this center peice graphic was done in Unreal.

Using a Robycam cable camera system with built in tracking and Unreal 5.3. The rock break was made in blender as a simulation and imported into Unreal using an alembic cache. Also using fire and particle effects made in Embergen.

Amazon's Thursday Night Football broke all sorts of records for regular season NFL games in 2024 and we would often create large "full stadium takeovers" like this one for special games like Halloween, Black Friday and Christmas.

We used a Mosys mechanical jib kit for our AR graphics on a 20ft jib and used the VizRT plugin for Unreal.

Following the sucess of the Netflix Boxing event, Netflix knocked it out of the park with 2 NFL games on christmas day, as well as a studio show at NFL Network in LA. This AR was based on designs by 2Fresh who completed all of the offline graphics for the broadcast.

This was using standard Unreal 5.3 and Skycames built in tracking solution Wildcat. I had to battle the elements with this setup with bellow freezing tempretures in Pitsburgh and our render engines outside the OB truck in the cold.

Why Unreal For Broadcast AR Graphics?

One thing that all three of those broadcasts have in common is that they are all on streaming platforms instead of triditonal TV stations. These new streamers are looking for a point of diffrence from the triditonal broadcasters and the graphcis department is one place they can really step up their game. This is where Unreal can step in todo bigger and better comapred to triditonal AR graphics engines.

Things like Niagra particle systems. Choas cloth and physics. VDBs, geomtry cache and skeletal aniamtions and blueprints and game features allow us to make graphics more complicated, bigger and smarter.

Controlling Unreal

How does one control all of these new, amazing and super cool graphics? We'll we have settled on remote control. Specifically remote control presets. This represents the ideal control scheme for me. First of all Unreal has an amazing auto generated control page we utalised for both Tyson vs Paul and Netflix Christmas but also a really robust rest API for building your own solutions.

The main reason RCPs are better, at least in my opnion comapred to say OSC (Something i have made alot of tutorials on) is because the rest based API allows for the discovery of the exposed parrameters. Unlike OSC where you need to know (And make) the controlled parrametters ahead of time. The rest based way of remote control allows you to simply query the server for the exposed parrameters and there types to make a dynamic front end that adapts to your setup.