Carmen: Live Immersive Opera

Whitepot Studios developed the Meta Quest experience for an experimental live transmission of English National Opera's Carmen, streaming the performance from the London Coliseum to audiences at Studio Ulster in Belfast using XR, 5G and immersive spatial audio.

XR Development / Meta Quest / Unity / Live Streaming

Whitepot Studios worked with HoloEdge Digital on an experimental live transmission of English National Opera’s Carmen, exploring how immersive technology could bring a live performance to audiences hundreds of miles away.

Developed through CoSTAR Screen Lab’s 5G Innovation in Screen Technologies programme, the project streamed a dress rehearsal live from the London Coliseum to Studio Ulster in Belfast. The same performance was presented simultaneously on Studio Ulster’s VP3 LED volume and to an audience wearing Meta Quest 3 headsets.

The first work-in-progress live stream success!

Live opera, delivered to Meta Quest

Whitepot developed and integrated the Unity application used for the headset experience.

To receive the live video directly within a standalone Quest application, we built VLC from source and integrated it into the HoloEdge Classical Unity app, creating a playback pipeline suitable for the incoming low-latency stream. The application also incorporated features including passthrough and subtitle support.

We handled private deployment of the application across multiple Quest 3 headsets and were on site at Studio Ulster to support and demonstrate the experience during the live broadcast.

A distributed immersive performance

The project brought together live video, XR and an audio-first streaming pipeline designed to recreate the experience of being inside the London Coliseum.

Nimblecast provided the low-latency streaming architecture, while Stunt Double and d&b audiotechnik worked on immersive audio and d&b Soundscape. The final pipeline carried eight channels of spatial audio over 5G from London to Belfast.

Alongside the headset audience, another group experienced the broadcast on Studio Ulster’s LED volume with a full spatial audio system, creating two very different remote presentations of the same live performance.

Students from the Marion Centre of Excellence watching the live Carmen dress rehearsal in VR (source).

The pilot formed part of a wider investigation into how opera and other live performance could be distributed beyond the physical venue using immersive, streaming and recording technologies.

Services: Unity Development · Meta Quest Development · XR Development · Live Streaming Integration · Immersive Experiences · Technical R&D · Deployment & On-site Support