Ihor Chupryna is a stage director and stage designer at WePlay Studios with more than 15 years experience working on international events.
Virtual stages aren’t new, but people still mix up what they really are. When people say “virtual stage,” they often mean LED panels or a 3D background that simply decorates a physical set. That can work, but for me as a stage director, the key point is different: the line between the physical and the virtual stage should be invisible.
A virtual stage should feel right for its world. It must match the story, the characters, and what the audience expects. It is part of the performance: it sets the mood, supports the action, and helps the event stand out. That’s why choosing the right style and details is a real stage designer’s job.
In this piece, I’ll show my approach through one case study: VTuber Awards, where we built a virtual world for a live-streamed VTuber performance.
A few words about The VTuber Awards
The VTuber Awards is the first-ever awards show dedicated exclusively to VTubing culture. It celebrates the impact of virtual creators in streaming and brings together VTubers worldwide, regardless of audience size, language, or genre. Because VTubing is virtual by nature, we couldn’t treat the stage as decoration. We had to design a world that felt real, worked in live broadcast, and supported performance using virtual production from the ground up.
Framework: 5 things a virtual stage needs to have
To make a virtual space look believable, I always keep five pillars in mind:
- Scale and perspective — so the space reads as real, not like a flat backdrop.
- Lighting logic — light should behave as it does in a physical environment: direction, depth, accents.
- Performance first — the stage supports the artist/character, not steals attention.
- Camera language — framing, lenses, movement, focus points: a virtual world only exists through the camera.
- Real-time constraints — what looks great in a render can be risky in a live broadcast.
These five principles are what separate scenography from just a “pretty picture.”
What does that mean in practice?
My rule is simple: don’t separate “real” and “virtual” scenography. When I create a physical stage, I don’t only think about “how nice it looks.” I think about how it works on camera, where the audience's focus goes, how the stage supports the event’s atmosphere, and how it interacts with the performers.
I build virtual worlds using the same logic: from the idea, to a 3D model, and then checking whether it’s realistic and doable in production. Every detail serves a purpose: to highlight something, hide something, create depth, or hold attention. Because even a digital stage has to follow real-world rules.
Tools that made our virtual production possible:
1. Unreal Engine
The core platform where we built the virtual set like environments, lighting, materials, effects, and animation—in real time.
2. Camera tracking and synchronization
Tracking systems send the real camera’s position, rotation, and lens data into the virtual scene. This keeps perspective and scale correct, so virtual elements feel like they share the same space as the hosts and performers.
3. A show control system
A control layer, like Disguise, that coordinates multiple rendering nodes, manages timing and synchronization, and routes output signals to various destinations, from LED screens to broadcast feeds. Disguise unifies them into a single system, ensuring stability and predictable live output.
4. AR graphics tools
Tools like Pixotope integrate with tracking systems and Unreal Engine, allowing us to add AR objects, titles, visual effects, and interactive elements directly into the frame.
5. Real-time hardware
Powerful GPU servers and workstations, genlock/timecode sync, tracking-ready cameras and sensors, plus a low-latency network. This is the foundation that makes real-time rendering reliable in live broadcast.
Creating an underwater world that still feels physical.
For VTuber Awards, I created an underwater world that matched the lore of one of the hosts and the overall event idea. Because VTubers often use anime-style designs, our event also needed that genre look and mood to fit the audience.
It was important for me to keep a sense of physicality. Yes, you can’t build this world as a real physical stage, but it still has to work by real rules: light, depth, perspective, and how the camera reads the space. And that’s when Unreal Engine was our main player. Within it, full virtual studios can exist, including LED screen setups, character environments, and interactive elements that can change dynamically during the live broadcast
Water isn’t just a “blue background.” It’s how light and air behave; it’s an environment that affects the stage and how the audience reads the performers’ movement. In virtual space, the limits really do fall away—you can create any universe. But the audience will only believe it if you treat it like a real stage world, not like an added digital backdrop.
A VTuber is a performer on stage.
It might seem like working with avatars should be easier: you already have a digital character, and you just “place” them into a virtual stage. But in reality, a VTuber is a performer on stage, existing through a digital character.
That’s why scenography here is about building a space where the performer — even a digital VTuber avatar — looks natural, and the performance feels alive. I have to think in advance: how does the character exist in this world? How do they enter? How do they move? How do they interact?
We used stYpe to track the camera’s position and key parameters—location, rotation, and lens data—and send that information to Unreal Engine. As a result, the virtual scene can follow the real camera’s movement in real time, keeping perspective accurate and the space feeling consistent. This is essential for making virtual objects look like they truly exist in the same space as the hosts or performers.
Stage is virtual, production is physical
Even if there’s an animated 3D character on screen, the production is still physical. Everything is still shot in a studio space that must be precisely aligned with the virtual world. Real people perform motion capture; facial expressions and movement are captured; real operators shoot it all with real cameras. So you still place cameras and movement using real-world logic, but always with the virtual result in mind.
In reality, there is still a studio space, real cameras, real operators, and real staging processes. The main challenge is that the physical setup must be perfectly aligned with the virtual stage.
You still place cameras, build shots, and think about lenses and movement—but you do it while thinking about how everything will look inside the virtual world. This “translation” between real and virtual is critical. The smallest mismatch breaks the magic.
Real-Time constraints
When I come up with a creative idea, I’ve already mapped out how it can be built and delivered.. That matters always, but in real-time/live work, it matters even more. In a live broadcast, a virtual world can’t freeze. There is no room for technical surprises inside the stage.
In the underwater world, I wanted lots of air bubbles in the frame, and I wanted a character to appear “inside a bubble.” It gave a sense of magic and space.
But real-time rendering (especially live) has its own rules. The team told me something simple: transparent textures — like bubbles — can be heavy to render. That means a potential overload and a risk of a stutter during the live broadcast.
What do I do in that situation? I don’t cling to one visual trick. I keep the atmosphere and the idea. If the character can’t appear in a bubble, they can appear from a shell or through another image that creates the same feeling but is technically lighter.
Compromises for technical reasons don’t mean you lose the concept. On the contrary, your job as the stage director is to find a solution that keeps the style, the rhythm, and the feeling of the world.
The Key Takeaway
I don’t treat virtual stages as a “cool extra.” Today, it’s a tool that designers and scenographers must consider from the very beginning, especially for modern formats, avatar-based performances, hybrid shows, and real-time content. Because a virtual stage isn’t “we’ll add 3D later.” It’s the same part of the concept as lighting, camera, and directing. It shapes how the character exists, how the shot works, how scale is perceived, and how the audience connects with the show.
For me, a virtual stage is not an effect. It’s a language that performance speaks today. And if you don’t speak that language as a designer, you’re losing a powerful way to deliver the idea to the audience.