CoSTAR Screen Lab invites companies, technologists, and creatives to explore innovative applications of spatial audio to enhance audience interaction with visual assets in virtual production.

Virtual Production (VP) has rapidly transformed film, broadcast, live performance, simulation, and immersive media through real-time engines, LED volumes, motion capture, and digital twins. However, interaction with visual assets in VP environments remains predominantly screen-centric and visually mediated, presenting challenges in two key areas:

  • For human talent in productions where interaction with digital assets is essential.
  • For audiences navigating complex 3D environments on screen or in live performances or installations.

Spatial audio, the dynamic placement and movement of sound in three-dimensional space, offers an under-explored modality for navigating, manipulating, and understanding visual assets in VP environments. By turning sound into an interaction layer, spatial audio can:

  • Enhance situational awareness in complex real-time scenes.
  • Create new creative grammars between sound, space, and image.

This call asks: how can spatialised audio become an interaction layer that lets audiences or human talent discover, navigate, influence, and meaningfully engage with visual assets during production or live/hybrid digital performances?

Rather than treating sound as accompaniment, this R&D challenge positions 3D audio as a guide, affordance, and feedback system that enables audiences and human talent to interact with visual worlds more intuitively, accessibly, and collectively.

CoSTAR support for this call offers a combination of access to equipment and facilities, research expertise, and cash funding to support project costs. The total value of this support package is valued at over £150k per project. For this specific call up to two projects will be awarded cash funding of up to £35k per project.

Successful projects will have the opportunity to access:

  • Equipment and facilities: up to two intensive one-week development sprints at CoSTAR Screen Lab. This includes on-boarding and orientation on the required equipment by our technical team.
  • Research Expertise: staff will guide and collaborate with you during the tenancy, and will also be able to provide up to 10 days of ad-hoc support outside of these sprint windows over the project’s total duration.
  • Cash Funding: up to £35k per project is available to contribute to costs in undertaking the project.

Sign up for an online Q&A session with the CoSTAR Screen Lab team on Tuesday 28th July, 10am-11am.

Find out more and apply. Call closes 19 August 2026.