Work that ran alongside the PhD.

A multi-user XR broadcast studio

The TUS Control Room is an authoring tool for news broadcasting in which a director, producer, journalist and presenter occupy the same virtual studio and build broadcast-ready output together. It is the same problem as my doctoral work seen from a different industry: several non-programming professionals, one shared 3D environment, and a deadline.

I took handover from the previous researcher over a fortnight, which went less smoothly than planned. My partner-issued laptop had a firewall that blocked the networking the project depends on, and the replacement lab machine had a graphics card that would not hold a headset link. A useful reminder that in multi-user XR, most of the first week is infrastructure.

What I delivered

• Virtual studio lighting control, operable live from inside the experience.
• Virtual camera output routed into OBS for live production.
• Live video and audio synchronisation over NDI, which had been an open defect.
• A built virtual studio environment, subsequently optimised and baked.
• WebSocket control of audio, scene transitions and on-screen graphics.
• Default virtual camera positions, and groundwork for presenter position control.

Alongside the build I documented what I found, because the project had grown faster than its documentation. Network configuration before a demo was tribal knowledge, build steps differed by role, and role privileges were not clearly defined. Writing that down was not glamorous and it is the part the next person will use.

Getting two people into the same volumetric scene

Volumetric capture puts a real person into a virtual environment as live geometry rather than as a flat video plane. Doing it for one person is now fairly routine. Doing it for two at once, with synchronised audio, streamed into a running Unity production, is where the practical problems live.

Working directly with the partner's engineer, we brought up a combined seven camera arrangement and worked through the configuration sequence needed to hold both captures in sync. I then unit-tested the capture plugin against our own broadcast studio project, so the integration test with two presenters in the Control Room could follow.

The wider TRANSMIXR engagement also took me into national broadcaster test preparation with TG4 and into evaluation sessions run with Trinity College Dublin and Satore Studio. Four months of watching other teams run immersive evaluations was, in hindsight, some of the most useful methodological training I got.