Incoming students at Indiana University (IU)’s Media School in Bloomington, IN, have a new, fully immersive video production space to go with a slate of new classes on virtual and augmented reality production. Called the Kinetic Immersion and Extended Reality (KIX) Lab, the area allows students to make feature films, videos, and live productions, just like an increasing number of professional productions are being done today by media outlets like Fox, NBCUniversal, and Warner Bros.
Located in the Radio-Television Building at the IU Bloomington campus, one of the largest studio spaces in the Midwest, the new KIX Lab is the brainchild of David Tolchinsky, dean of the Media School and a filmmaker by trade. He saw an opportunity to create a next-level space that would bring the school's curriculum in line with what’s going on in the world of professional production for feature films and television.
“As a filmmaker himself, David had the vision to offer IU students a full immersion lab and the very latest in production tools to allow them to create high-impact storytelling,” said Jay Kincaid, director of facilities and technology at the Media School. “That’s really the mission at IU, to give students the best education and opportunities to succeed in the real world.”
Multi-Use Production Space
The Radio-Television Building is also home to WTIU, the Indiana Public Media TV Station, and will soon include a large sound immersion and performance space for live event projects that will cover the center of the evolving studio space. In fact, the school is spending more than $3 million to refresh its technology facilities. “Retrofitting the entire building went from being a big idea to a grand idea that could support a multitude of departments here at IU,” Kincaid said.
To see the KIX project to fruition, Kincaid brought in veteran systems integrator American Sound, which has completed several projects on the IU campus over the years. Daniel Martin, director of engineering at American Sound, along with Jeremiah Cooper, project manager at American Sound, oversaw a team of engineers and technicians from IA Stage and American Sound that constructed a free-standing (counter weighted) 32x15-foot, Unilumin 1.8mm UpadIV wall, pitched in 1-degree increments to create a seamless viewing experience.
They also installed a motorized 19x13-foot ceiling structure of Unilumin 3.9mm URMIII Pro LED cabinets, grouped in three sections, that can be lowered for ground-level maintenance and creative adjustments. And there's a 29x14-foot, Unilumin 3.9mm UDF03 LED “dance floor.” All three LED wall configurations are operated from a single NovaStar MX6000 COEX processor. A series of Kino Flo lights for keys and fills were borrowed from the school’s theater department and can be hung from the ceiling LED truss structure as necessary to illuminate desired areas of the virtual stage.
All signals are fed to a nearby equipment rack for real-time processing and monitoring. American Sound selected Pixotope Technologies for the professional virtual production software that fosters hands-on learning for students to gain industry-standard skills in AR, MR, and XR workflows in real time. The company said that its advanced image processing technology, which it offers to universities at a steep discount, prepares students for careers in virtual production “through practical experience with real-time technologies.”
IU’s KIX Lab uses Pixotrope to render a background scene across the LED wall. The system currently tracks a single camera and lens on only one plane using Pixotope’s Vision and Marker systems, but it can be upgraded to include the LED floor and celling planes with minimum hardware. Along with the camera tracking, the virtual production environment also uses Pixotope’s TalenTrack system, which tracks human talent in real time using static cameras to optically track and map subjects onto the virtual rendered video.
Teaching Production Workflows
Virtual projects are shot against the wall using a Canon EOS C300 MKIII digital cinema camera in 4K mode with a Canon 18-80mm T4.4 compact servo lens mounted to a Maxicrane Ostrich MK2 robotic camera crane. When the KIX space is complete (Phase 2 is planned), images will be processed in real time using an Unreal Engine system.
“Currently, the floor and the ceiling are not included in the Unreal Engine workflow,” Kincaid explained. “Those right now are treated more like lighting elements. It’s a better experience for the students to use the Pixotope software for things like camera tracking and 2D motion capture. We’ll be adding real-time processing for all workflows at a later date.”
Daniel Martin
Image credit: American Sound
Jay Kincaid
Image credit: Indiana University
With the current setup, students can create wireframe renderings of their desired scenic effects. For creating an AR experience that interacts with graphics and other visual elements, it’s more than suitable.
The system is genlocked to the building's master control room clock to keep all devices in sync.
“We’re tied to the main control room’s genlock as we are also getting feeds from their master control down into the KIX Lab space, which allows students to maintain sync at any given moment for other projects besides the immersive part,” Martin said.
Calibration is another critically important element to setting up a virtual production stage LED because it bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds, ensuring that the camera captures a seamless, photorealistic image rather than a mismatched, artificial-looking scene. “The Pixotope software has a way of calibrating that makes sure that the lens optics and camera are synced in real time, both to the space and to the user,” Martin added.
In this way, the parallax effect—where foreground objects appear to move faster than background objects when an actor on set moves, creating an illusion of 3D depth—is set correctly for students to use and the actors correctly appear in the virtual scene.
Budgets and Expectations
IU’s Kincaid said it’s important to have a person with extensive knowledge of virtual technology workflows on hand when necessary. To this end, IU employs Scott Carmichael, who has worked in radio and television at IU for 30 years.
“Scott is not only a professional graphic designer, but also a super smart guy who understands these virtual workflows,” Kincaid said, adding that Carmichael worked closely with American Sound during installation and setup. “There are so many questions when setting up and maintaining systems like these, and his knowledge helped make the KIX Lab what it is today. Without Scott and American Sound, there's just no way this could have ever been done. So much of the success of this project was working with the right partners."
For example, American Sound understood the complex nature of project budget approvals at IU and helped the nine-month project (August 2025-April 2026) run smoothly. “What happens with so many system designers is that the budget is just kind of a suggestion and it just keeps growing," Kincaid said. "It's never been that way with American Sound.”
“There's always a challenge to meet the budget,” Martin admitted. “In a lot of cases, it's usually a dance and that involves ways to keep talking or reframing the conversation to what is it we're trying to accomplish—what matters most to the client and to the space. And if you try and honor that and be true to that, there's places where you can make compromises that don’t diminish quality nor take away the functionality that they want.”
Giving students the best tools to succeed was paramount to bringing IU’s curriculum of building immersive experiences to the next level. They’ve also hired new faculty, led by Ivica Ico Bukvic, professor of media arts and production and KIX Lab director, to shepherd students through a new series of associated courses.
“We prepare students for careers, knowing that when they graduate, they have a good grasp of the types of tools and technology that they’ll see in the outside world,” Kincaid said. “At the Media School, we’re always looking at the most innovative technology and then making it accessible to our students in the easiest way possible. The new KIX Lab is just the latest example of that.”
