Like many other people, I have known Carlos Austin for as long as I have active in social virtual reality.
We first met in January 2018, as avatars in the social VR platform Sansar, at the virtual recreation of Intel’s booth at the real-life Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He was a cameraman for my short-lived but memorable stint as a host on the Metaverse Newscast, where I interviewed creators in both Sansar and High Fidelity (and honestly, we need to find some way to archive this slice of metaverse history!). Even though we have yet to meet in the real world, we have spent numerous hours together in various virtual worlds over the past decade, and we have become good friends. Carlos is often the source—or the instigator!— for many of the blogposts on the RyanSchultz.com blog.
As part of a monthly series of presentations hosted by Thomas Zorbach of IMMERSIVE-X, called X-Nights, Carlos was invited to come out from behind the camera and talk about his work as a filmmaker, capturing live events on a multitude of social VR platforms, both past and present.
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend this event (held yesterday, Sept. 10th, 2026 in VRChat) in person, but Carlos sent me the livestream recording, from which I took the following screenshots to share with you all. (Please click on any image in this gallery to see it in a larger size. You can find the video at the bottom of this blogpost, or here on YouTube.)
Here’s a partial transcript from just a part of this livestream, where Jason Moore of the MetaMovie project (which I have written about before on this blog), talks about Carlos and his pioneering work:
So, Carlos and I met in 2017, I think, in High Fidelity. As you probably have all met Carlos, he somehow found his way onto our set. We were rehearsing [pre-Alien Rescue, MetaMovie’s first production] and he just started taking pictures. And then at the end of the rehearsal, he sent me over this amazing album of all the pictures from the rehearsal, and it was all professional. So we immediately hit it off. We we both study and love live multicam television. Carlos has been a friend and a and a helper and a colleague for for so long.
When we got around to the stage of finally finishing up Alien Rescue and starting to launch it to the public, I had always had a fantasy about doing live multicam in VR. And it’s something that Carlos and I would talk about. [Metaverse platform] Resonite is this very special engine where you can really build just about anything you can imagine. So, I shopped around and I found some developers who were willing to try to build a bespoke VR multicam system. And it it was not easy.
Actually, it took us almost a year to kind of get this thing tuned up. Carlos was there the whole way, telling us exactly what he would need or what he would want and how he would want to use this thing. It was developed by the lead programmer for Secrets of Gar, the project we’re working on now. And we we ended up with this technology that was kind of an infinite multicam switcher. You could add as many cameras as you wanted. You could pin cameras to performers, getting a frontal medium shot or even an over-the-shoulder shot. You could assign the cameras to camera operators who could fly around invisibly in the world. And Carlos could attach it to his avatar and um kind of direct by just pointing at all of the screens on the fly.
There is a lot of technology going on in here. And you know, Carlos and I probably spent hundreds and hundreds of hours just thinking through, you know, the kind of work that we do like the Ferryman . It’s kind of live. It’s it’s acting. It’s moving. It’s action-packed. There’s a lot of stuff going on. Trying to get that all covered and and livestreamed out in a cinematic way to Twitch, which is what our workflow was.
Conceptually, it took many, many months just to figure out what the right approach was. And then technically, I think we told each other, Carlos, you know, the first twenty times we did it, we kept saying, “Okay, this was awful. This didn’t work. This is fine, but we’re learning every single time.” And it wasn’t until about thirty shows in until I think we finally both thought like, “Oh, shoot. This is really starting to come together.”
I tell Carlos all the time that what he does, on a technical level, nobody else on this planet is doing. He understands both visual storytelling, live broadcasting, and the immersive world in a way that I don’t know anybody else who does.
Deirdre Lyons and the Ferryman Collective won a 2026 Emmy Award for the live VR theatrical production Uncanny Alley: A New Day in the Outstanding Emerging Media Program category (you can purchase tickets for the show here). She was effusive in her praise of Carlos, stating:
Can I just say that this lovely, lovely, fabulous gentleman I’ve known since I’ve gotten into VRChat and um started doing all of this stuff and has helped us out so many times that I can’t even begin to thank you, who even jumped on and helped us do a recording to help us get the [Emmy] nomination and all of that. So, this guy is has my heart and always hosts a great event at South by Southwest when we’re there and makes the backyard feel like an XR Social Club in real life. So, just thank you, Carlos. You are a gentleman and a scholar.
Or, to put it simply, as Thomas Zorbach, the organizer of the event, said: “What you do is magic.”
Here’s the YouTube video of Carlos’ presentation, from which I gained a much deeper understanding and appreciation of how he works, and I hope you do as well (and yes, he recorded his own speech using the multicam technique he talks about!):
What does it take to film a live event inside a virtual world?
VR filmmaker Carlos Austin has spent years developing techniques for capturing talks, concerts, conferences, and multi-day events such as IMMERSIVE X across social VR platforms. Working with multiple virtual cameras and camera operators, he directs and switches between shots in real time – creating a finished broadcast in TV quality that turns immersive events into compelling experiences for audiences watching on a 2D screen, while the event itself is still happening.
In this X-NIGHT, Carlos takes us behind the virtual lens and into the emerging craft of live VR filmmaking. He’ll share how multi-camera productions work inside social VR, how virtual cinematography differs from filming in the physical world, and what he has learned from documenting events across platforms including VRChat, ENGAGE, Resonite, Rec Room, Horizon Worlds, Sansar, and Wave.
Oh, and don’t forget that the 2026 IMMERSIVE X Festival is also coming up, from November 10th to 12th, 2026. You can check out the calendar here. I wrote about last year’s festival/conference here, here, and here.
P.S. The audience also sang Happy Birthday to Carlos, as Sept. 10th was also his birthday. Happy belated birthday, Carlos!
