If you’ve watched anything from The Mandalorian to an episode of Doctor Who in the last few years, you’ve already seen virtual production at work — you just couldn’t tell. That’s rather the point.
Virtual production using LED volumes (also called in-camera VFX, or ICVFX) has made an astonishing leap from experimental technology to standard production toolkit in about five years. What started as a clever trick for Disney’s budget has become something UK broadcasters and production companies are now building into their permanent infrastructure. So what actually is it, how does XR fit in, and why does any of this matter if you’re not a cinematographer?
The Basic Idea
Traditional VFX puts actors in front of a green screen, then composites a digital background in post-production. It works, but actors have no visual reference for their environment, lighting has to be guessed at and corrected later, and the process of replacing all that green is expensive and time-consuming.
LED volumes flip this around. The set is surrounded by enormous curved panels of high-resolution LED screens — sometimes two or three storeys tall — displaying photorealistic 3D environments in real time. The actor walks into what looks and feels like a desert canyon, a spacecraft hangar, or a rain-soaked London street. The lighting from those screens actually falls on their face. The camera captures them interacting with their environment without a single green pixel in sight.
Here’s where the XR part comes in: the virtual environment displayed on those screens is rendered in real time by a game engine — typically Unreal Engine 5 from Epic Games. And it’s not just static imagery. The camera’s position is tracked with submillimetre precision, and the virtual world adjusts its perspective to match the camera’s view in real time. Move the camera left, and the background shifts exactly as it would if the scene were real. This is called parallax correction, and it’s what makes the result look like you’re filming on location rather than in a studio.
Why It’s Different From Green Screen
The practical benefits go beyond aesthetics. On a traditional green screen shoot, the director can’t really make lighting decisions in the moment — they’re lighting actors against a blank void and hoping post-production matches it. On an LED volume, the virtual environment is the light source. Golden hour on a fictional planet? Adjust the sun angle in Unreal Engine and the whole stage bathes in warm orange light, completely naturally, in real time.
This is a genuine creative shift. Cinematographers can make lighting decisions on the day, in collaboration with the director, without waiting weeks for VFX artists to interpret their intentions. Actors can react to something actually there. Directors can evaluate shots on the day rather than reviewing rough composites months later.
The practical result is that some productions using LED volumes have cut their VFX budgets by 30–50% compared to equivalent green screen productions, despite having what look like more ambitious visual effects. Less is being corrected in post because more is being captured correctly in-camera.
The XR Toolkit Behind It
Modern virtual production stages typically use a combination of systems. Unreal Engine provides the real-time 3D environment and handles the rendering. A tracking system — usually OptiTrack or the camera maker’s own solution — feeds precise camera position data to the engine so it can update the perspective in real time. The LED panels themselves, typically from manufacturers like ROE Visual or Roe Black Pepper, need to run at high enough refresh rates to avoid moiré patterns when captured by a film camera.
The whole system is increasingly called an “XR Stage” rather than a virtual production stage, acknowledging that these environments aren’t just static backdrops — they’re interactive, responsive spaces that mix physical and digital reality in real time.
Smaller versions of this setup — XR stages using curved LED panels without the full overhead structure — are now accessible to mid-budget productions. A compact XR stage can be hired for a few thousand pounds per day at facilities like Lux Aeterna in London, Garden Studios in Ladbroke Grove, or NEP Group’s facilities in the Midlands.
UK Adoption
The UK production industry has been enthusiastic adopters. The BBC has invested in XR stage capability for drama productions, and BBC Studios uses virtual production for everything from natural history sequences to Doctor Who’s more ambitious locations. Sky Studios’ facility at Elstree includes LED volume capability, and independent studios across the country have built out XR stage space to serve the growing demand.
What’s driven this beyond the creative benefits is practicality. Location filming in the UK comes with weather, permits, travel costs, and logistics that can easily consume a significant portion of a production budget. An LED volume stage gives you the look of that Icelandic glacier or Moroccan market without leaving Hertfordshire, on a schedule you actually control.
What’s Coming
The next wave is about making these stages more accessible and more capable. Pixel density continues to increase — the gap between what you can render in real time at film quality and what you’d composite in post is narrowing fast. Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen and Nanite rendering systems have substantially improved the quality achievable in real time without custom shader work.
There’s also interesting work happening around using XR headsets as directorial tools on virtual production stages — wearing a Quest or Vision Pro to walk through the virtual environment before locking camera positions, or visualising how a scene will look at different times of day without rendering the full LED display. This kind of pre-visualisation workflow is already in use at several UK facilities and is becoming a standard part of how virtual production stages are operated.
For anyone in production, location management, or broadcast technology, virtual production isn’t a specialist curiosity any more. It’s a tool that belongs in the toolkit alongside location scouting and traditional VFX — different trade-offs, increasingly competitive economics, and genuine creative advantages that green screen simply can’t match.