2026 Accelerator Project

Objectives

Champions: ITV, SMPTE, King's College London, BBC, EBU, University of Southampton, Reality Hack at MIT, University of Galway, XPLOR, Montreux Media Ventures

Participants: Surround Sync, Shure, The Third Orchestra, RePro Stream, MagicBeans, BEAM IMMERSIVE

This ambitiously creative, live immersive production-focused Accelerator explored the end-to-end workflows needed for immersive and interactive live streaming broadcasts at music festivals, aiming to combine multi-perspective, 180/360-degree video, live mixed spatial audio, cinematic VR, and interactive, remote audience participation via gamification and site-specific audio personalisation. 

The consortium also aimed to develop a framework blueprint for two-way, interactive, shared broadcast experiences that could bring interaction and togetherness with fans in the venue and remotely, using interactive 3D virtual worlds via VR (Virtual Reality) and potentially AR (Augmented Reality) techniques. 

POC Results 

POC highlights came from several hands-on, on-location tests, backed by trust from major A-list titles and IP formats. This included a groundbreaking spatial audio stream live from the 2026 Montreux Jazz Festival, captured and broadcast as a full spatial performance by US headliners Vulfpeck, to controlled test groups in the UK and Australia. A second test at King's College London saw the team conduct R&D as live, multi-location, multi-player, movement-based interaction-design storytelling using 3D interactive worlds, along with a live 6DOF (six degrees of freedom) spatial audio experience, both featuring world music group The Third Orchestra. Lastly, the IFeL team travelled to The Voice of Holland studios in Hilversum, the Netherlands, where, on the iconic Voice shiny floor set, they tested an ‘R&D first’ 4D Gaussian Splat capture, as well as a multi-location/audience interactivity test during the live ‘dream audition’ of IBC IFeL’s very own global rapper Charlie Blaine. 

The team also had the chance to conduct early, pre-event testing at AWE USA (Augmented World Expo) and on-location experiments in Perth, Australia, USA, London, and Lincoln, UK, which helped guage early learnings and inform go/no-go decisions. 

With Audio and Spatial Audio being the key anchors of the challenge, especially to help support the ambitions of VR (both cinematic and interactive), the IFeL consortium concentrated on top-tier recorded and live spatial audio (multi-channel and binaural).  To complement this, the team also implemented 180 stereo and 360 video streaming with each experiment, while expanding the scope to prototype 4D Gaussian Splatting. Because AR glasses were unavailable, the team shifted its interactivity focus from AR to VR, driven by audio cues and VR participation. 

A core goal was to capture reality itself, not just video frames, and established that viewpoint-aware audio and video volumetric pipelines were ripe for integration and exploitation.  Critical to this IFeL team’s approach was making output available on a variety of low-end (e.g. mobile phone) and high-end (VR Headset) platforms, and exploring the restrictions that limited bandwidth may cause, more of which can be found in the POC paper learning: ‘The Tech Behind Immersion’, found below in the POC Results section. 

Interactivity also remained a core objective of the project: Allowing the user to choose where to be, how to navigate, and investigating how sound and viewpoint interact. This gave them access to impossible viewpoints and, above all, agency to the fans during a broadcast. This marked a welcome contrast between designing events for participation and incorporating participation into existing events. Close cooperation with Champions The Third Orchestra, BBC R&D, and Reality Hack MIT led to bespoke work that explored this, and how such pieces can operate live and be reused again in other environments - for instance, as a demo or live screening at IBC itself. 

R&D findings suggest the industry is about 2-3 years away from a full audio/visual/interactive 4D spatial master becoming a reality, boosted by suggested collaborative standards work. In addition, both high-profile and grassroots venues will need standardised sync, bandwidth, and latency, with predicted edge-compute and data centres to enable the seamless integration of live immersive interactivity and calibration into every live performance, with every fan included, and ensure the live music experience and thus live broadcasting, endures an endless lifespan. 

This was a fantastic piece of work for all Champions and Participants, with much more R&D to come, and the future of immersive interactive shared content is upon us in a flash.

Key Goals & Achievements

AUDIO: 

• A live spatial audio capture, mix and render from the Montreux Jazz Festival to three remote, global test groups in the UK and Australia via CDN 

• The Third Orchestra and Montreux/Vulfpeck live audio captures together featured:  

• Beam-forming Arrays, Spatial ambient capture, close-mic, DI, and FOH mix 

• Per-camera position spatial mixes for post-production 

• A live full spatial broadcast mix creation with timing and spatial relationships 

• Real-time 6DoF reconstruction, interaction design and rendering 

• Real-time acoustic simulation to match listener environment 

• Render formats included: 

• Binaural headphones 

• 6DoF free roam mapped to shared  listener space, rendered via Android phones 

• VR headset rendered environments 

• VR Headsets with shared 5.1 loudspeakers 

• OPSODIS spatial soundbar 

VIDEO: 

• Successful live transmission of 180-degree stereoscopic and 360-degree video to remote global audiences 

• Exploration of mass audience at scale for cinematic VR visuals to remote audiences, including spatial audio components 

• Capture of a 3D Gaussian Splat with 4D Gaussian Splat content in a live context setting, via a working broadcast studio 

INTERACTIVITY: 

• Spatial audio for movement, orientation and navigation through a spatial soundfield 

• Exploration of coherent visual and acoustic perspective when changing viewpoint 

• Gesture, dance and whole-body interaction across physical and virtual spaces 

• Fan agency, participation and contribution to live experiences 

• Connection between artists, in-person and remote fans 

• Multi-device interaction across platforms, physical and virtual contexts  

POC RESULTS Showcased at IBC2026: 

The IBC IFeL team successfully presented all POC case studies as a live one hour showcase session on stage to a packed-out audience, and at the IBC Accelerator Zone in Hall 14 they presented a variety of live POC demo experiences at the Pod, to show depth of their cutting-edge R&D with our major IP partners, namely: 

• MONTREUX Jazz Festival - spatial audio and 360/180 cinematic style VR of a live concert featuring Vulfpeck 

• THE THIRD ORCHESTRA - 6DOF spatial audio experience design 

• THE VOICE of HOLLAND/AWE- Multi-user interactive dance-off/fan engagement 

• THE VOICE of HOLLAND/Montreux Jazz Festival - Multi-user interactive 3D world portals 

View the Project's Final Showcase Deck 

View the Experiential & Interaction Design Learnings Paper

View the Technical Focus Learnings Paper

What’s Next? 

• 2.0 ambitions include establishing specifications for vendor convergence and interoperability to facilitate live immersive interactive workflows, with accessibility needs in mind 

• Capture -> Store and Transmit -> CDN -> Render -> Interactivity (and feed back)> Immersive, Multi-Platform 3D Environments 
• Explore on-site, edge and remote compute, storage, and bandwidth advances for the lowest-latency immersive broadcast 

• Further experimentation with Audio, Video, 4D Gaussian Splats with Interactivity, including AR (Augmented Reality) 

• Extended Audience Interactivity: 

• Via remote audience engagement directly with the live performance  
• Demonstrate new ways for the in-person audience to interact with remote audiences in real time, while experiencing immersive transmission from within the venue