Designing a BBC Studio to Practice Media Interviews in VR

Virtual reality provides a great way to practice media interviews in a realistic setting. When you put on the VR headset, you’ll be immersed in a TV studio with a presenter asking you questions.

In this article, we discuss how we built a BBC styled studio, so that people can practice being interviewed and familiarise themselves with a typical studio layout.

Several of the objects in the scene were available to purchase online and only required minor alterations, including the table, TV and seats. However some of the objects needed to be created from scratch. The largest of these were the studio cameras, which required specific modelling to create.

Our VR application currently runs on mobile devices so we paid close attention to the number of polygons in the scene. We aimed for less than 150,000 polygons for the whole scene, including the presenter and other avatars, giving us about 100,000 polygons for just the studio.

Small details, such as lighting and shadows, can make the scene look much more realistic. We spent several hours adding this lighting and other objects into the scene so that it matched the reference video more accurately.

One of the techniques we used to was look at each object in the scene and understand how scene reflections affected the object. A key part of this is whether the object was moving in the scene. Objects which weren’t moving, including the floor, walls and table, could have the reflections baked into the texture to save on performance. Other objects, such as the presenter and cameras, had to have real-time reflections applied to them so that when they moved, the reflections and shadows changed accordingly.

Another performance consideration is how much detail you have on the screen at any one time and the distance of the objects from the user. Some studio details can be low-poly meshes with everything baked in, like the spotlight frames in the distant corners of the room. Other objects which are closer require a higher poly count so that their surfaces are smoother and more realistic looking.

This scene was designed to make you feel uncomfortable, as you would (probably) be in an actual media interview. There are several techniques to achieve this which were implemented:

Here are several screenshots of the BBC studio in development taken from two angles:

The main task with designing this scene is getting the overall look correct. Our eyes are really good at spotting inconsistencies and anything that doesn’t look realistic. However, as we are using mobile phones to power the VR experience, it’s a constant trade-off between performance and look. We were constantly asking ourselves questions like “do we really need this glossy material on that object, or we can imitate it somehow?”.

For this, we created an avatar model using Adobe Fuse. The models from Fuse are fairly realistic but come with a high polygon count (20–60k). This was a compromise we took as the user is very close to the presenter so quality was very important.

The presenter (avatar) is one of the most important parts of the scene. She needs to have realistic movements, speech and behaviour, in line with what you would expect with a real presenter.

We’ve played plenty of videogames where bugs and poor game design completely break the immersion and make you realise that you’re just in a game. We were very keen not to fall into this category and worked hard to keep the immersion for the user (person practicing the interview).

The virtual presenter needs a database of potential questions to ask the user. We manually recorded a list of questions and utilised lip sync technology with spatial audio to give the impression the presenter was asking these questions.

We added a feature where users can record their own voice. Users can then save their answers and listen back to them at any time to review how they’ve done.

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