How virtual production is bringing the news to life at Al Arabiya

Fadi Radi, director of creative at Al Arabiya News Channel, talks to Broadcast Tech editor Jake Bickerton about how an ambitious mix of state-of-the-art virtual studios and virtual production sets are being used to visualise the week's biggest news stories.

Every week, Al Arabiya creates a new eye-catching virtual set, immersing the viewer in a virtual world related to the topic under discussion.

The environments created in these extended reality (XR) sets are whatever the editorial requires, with the presenter seamlessly embedded into the scene.

So far, they have included the Amazon rain forest, an underwater scene, a space scene, immersive 360-degree views of Afghanistan and Iran, and the blood stream.

The quick-turnaround sets are created using a combination of Unreal engine and Vizrt for tracking the camera movement in real-time.

Vizrt chief technology officer Gerhard Lang also joins the podcast to explain how Vizrt works in partnership with Al Arabiya News Channel to enable the broadcaster to fulfill its editorial vision.