When the stage disappeared, Dolby’s keynote went virtual — and stayed unforgettable.

A marquee stage, with no stage to stand on.

GDC is one of the biggest stages in the game industry calendar, and a Dolby keynote there carries real weight — the kind of appearance built around lighting, presence, and a live room reacting in real time. The pandemic took all of that away at once.

Dolby needed a way to deliver the moment virtually without it feeling like a downgrade: no live audience, no physical stage, and a production team scattered across the globe instead of in one building.

A performance, rebuilt entirely inside a game engine.

Aspect Multimedia worked as an Unreal Engine generalist inside 090 Media’s global remote production team.

• CAPTURE: Performance capture sessions translated into digital performance data for a virtual presenter.
• METAHUMAN: High-fidelity MetaHuman avatars built and animated to carry the keynote’s presence and expression.
• REAL-TIME: Real-time rendering in Unreal Engine, turning the keynote into a gamified, cinematic virtual experience rather than a static video call.
• REMOTE PIPELINE: Production coordinated entirely across a distributed, international team working through pandemic-era constraints.

Presence, without a room.

The goal wasn’t to simulate a stage — it was to build something that only worked because it was virtual.

• MetaHuman avatars carried real performance-capture nuance, not canned animation.
• Unreal Engine’s real-time renderer let the keynote feel cinematic rather than pre-rendered.
• The format leaned into gamified pacing rather than mimicking a static livestream.
• A fully remote, global team shipped the production without ever sharing a physical room.

Brand prestige, held virtually.

Maintaining brand prestige in a virtual-only environment — for one of the industry’s most recognizable audio brands, at one of its biggest stages.