Trans Realities Lab Wins International Production Award at Next Reality Festival 2025

DAE proudly announces that the Trans Realities Lab has won the International Production Award at Hamburg’s Next Reality Festival for its groundbreaking project “XR-IT – Non-Local Virtual Production Cat Content”.

Having become one of the most prestigious XR awards in the German-speaking world, the nextReality.Contest was launched in 2017. Each year, the competition honors outstanding Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality projects that stand out through innovation, creative excellence, and technological sophistication.

During the festival’s ninth edition, the Trans Realities Lab presented Cat Content, the first film produced in the Metaverse using Distributed Virtual Production, an approach that enables new models for real-time content creation. Actors, cinematographers, directors, artists and production staff can be virtually collocated across widely distributed geographies, working together as if on a virtual ‘film set’. The Distributed Virtual Production approach was made possible through the Trans Realities Lab’s innovative XR-IT research and development programme.

Professor Dr. Ian Biscoe of the Trans Realities Lab, who leads the XR-IT project and was Producer for Cat Content, said:

“It is a fantastic acknowledgement of all the long hours and creativity put into the project by the team in making the first live animated film shot across multiple locations simultaneously”

"The production was enabled by the revolutionary XR-IT platform which has been developed in the Trans Realities Lab. XR-IT provides a software and systems framework for high-quality, distributed immersive collaboration, working in conjunction with games engines such as Unreal and Unity. It allows real-time creative collaboration across multiple physical locations using XR."

The Trans Realities Lab extends special thanks to the EMIL Project of Horizon Europe, Aalto University, the staff of the Trans Realities Lab, and Andreas Dahn (Director and Script Writer of Cat Content).

The technical visual artist for the production was Thibaud Henique, an alumnus of DAE / Digital Focus Module. Assistant Technical Artist was Zak Lennard, also a DAE alumnus and current member of the Trans Realities Lab (TRL). Technical support was provided by Bart van Nes and Kasia Lukaszuk, both DAE alumni now working within TRL, and our extended team of lab staff and dedicated freelancers.