When COSM set out to transform Stephen King's IT into the world's first cinematic horror experience in Shared Reality, they turned to Realdream to lead the creative visualization. The result, IT in Shared Reality, premiered at COSM Los Angeles to enthusiastic audiences and press, bringing Pennywise and the town of Derry to life on the immersive dome in a way no screen ever could.
A New Storytelling Canvas
The immersive dome is not a bigger screen. It is a fundamentally different medium, one that wraps the audience inside the frame, with its own rules of scale, composition, and presence. Realdream approached IT not by adapting flat film language to a curved surface, but by building the entire visualization natively for the dome from the ground up, designing every sequence for the way an audience actually experiences it inside the space.
Technical Innovation
Our team developed a proprietary real-time pipeline purpose-built for immersive dome production:
- Industry-first live Unreal-to-dome playback. We pioneered a workflow that streams real-time directly from Unreal Engine onto the full COSM dome during creative sessions, a first for the platform. Instead of rendering, waiting, and reviewing, the creative team could see changes live, at venue scale, in the moment.
- Custom tooling that extends Unreal for the dome. We built a suite of in-house tools that push Unreal Engine beyond its native capabilities to deliver real-time, dome-accurate latlong rendering, turning a game engine into a feature-scale immersive production system.
- Live VR dome review. We created a real-time VR workflow that let the creative team step inside the dome virtually during on-site sessions, making and seeing creative decisions in the exact geometry of the final venue before a single frame was finaled.
- Real-time iteration at feature scale. The entire system was engineered so the creative team could iterate like a live-action edit, exploring and refining the story at the speed of thought rather than the speed of rendering.
Strategic Partnership
Once again our collaboration with AMD proved instrumental. AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO and Radeon PRO hardware handled the immense demands of rendering feature-scale environments in real-time at immersive dome resolution, directly in engine, making the live, iterative workflow possible.
Impact
IT in Shared Reality established Realdream as a pioneer in a brand-new storytelling medium:
- Delivered a complete, feature-scale immersive dome experience, story-first, from visualization through creative finaling
- Pioneered real-time creative workflows the immersive platform had never seen before
- Proved that a nimble, senior team can define the creative and technical language of an entirely new format
- Opened a new frontier for Realdream in large-format, location-based entertainment
Realdream continues to partner with COSM on bringing major IP to the immersive dome.
