5G AND 6G NETWORKS TECH
CoSTAR is a £75.6 million government- funded programme of five interlinked UK labs, fusing the film and TV industry and the latest VP equipment with academic research into AI, video gaming, robotics and immersive sound. Four labs have already opened, with one in Pinewood launching in 2026. “Our focus is on how real-time technologies can be built into production processes and pipelines,” reveals White. “There’s still quite a lot of soldering and sellotape involved in making volume stage work. We’re looking to plug that gap with software, so you don’t need an army of programmers to be able to implement your creative vision.” The Realtime Lab based in Dundee was behind the original VP over 5G proof of concept. It draws on Scotland’s world- leading expertise in gaming ( Minecraft mobile developer 4J Studios is based in Dundee), linked to Abertay University motion-capture studios and Edinburgh University studios, Water’s Edge Studio, Scottish Enterprise and more. Now it’s working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build the Cloud Lab, “which will be a virtual doppelgänger of the physical studio,” White explains. “We could then extend across the CoSTAR network (of studios in Yorkshire, Belfast and London) and facilitate people from anywhere in the world to come in and collaborate virtually.” The proof of concept in 2023 demonstrated that 5G could reduce latency between locations, so that actors could perform scenes ‘naturally’. “That was the penny-drop moment for me, in terms of what CoSTAR Realtime Lab could do. We proved that we could send camera telemetry back and forth over the network, but it was also a very static scene. Now we’re asking how we can extend that functionality so that somebody in LA could be acting with someone in London for a virtual scene in a way that looks naturalistic in terms of performance, as well as coherent in terms of colour, lighting values and dynamic lighting effects.”
CLOSING THE GAP 5G media production solutions like Riedel’s (left) allow film crews to shoot with actors in different countries
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