- PIXERA × District Cinema
An Evening of Innovation for Themed Entertainment in Santa Monica.
District Cinema partnered with Pixera for the Themed Entertainment Association Western North America Summer Mixer in Santa Monica. The event brought together creatives, technologists, and brand leaders for an evening focused on emerging tools, real-time workflows, and the future of themed entertainment experiences.
To showcase how advanced media servers and real-time technology can elevate themed entertainment through interactive, immersive, and accessible experiences.
Kaiju in Downtown
Guests stepped into a virtual city rendered on an LED wall, where real-time motion tracking allowed them to interact with the environment and trigger large-scale destruction as a roaming Kaiju. Body movement and gestures seamlessly blended participants into the experience.
Wizard’s Training Ground
Participants practiced spellcasting through gesture recognition, projecting fireballs and interacting with destructible elements in a dungeon-style environment. The experience combined physical movement with real-time feedback to create an engaging, game-like interaction.
Gaussian Splat Viewer
Guests stepped into a virtual city rendered on an LED wall, where real-time motion tracking allowed them to interact with the environment and trigger large-scale destruction as a roaming Kaiju. Body movement and gestures seamlessly blended participants into the experience.
Behind the scenes, Unreal Engine ran on a dedicated Windows workstation using nDisplay to render real-time 3D scenes at 4K resolution. Its output was transmitted over SMPTE 2110 via an NVIDIA Rivermax card, streaming frames directly into the Pixera Two RS media server. Once received, Pixera handled compositing and LED-wall playback in real time, layering in hand-drawn flipbook-style loading visuals (thanks Tavs) between experiences to create smooth transitions as guests moved from Kaiju mayhem to wizard duels to the Gaussian Splat viewer.
Pixera Control acted as the bridge between worlds, sending OSC commands to Unreal to load or reset each level, while Unreal sent back “ready” signals to cue the next scene. All motion-tracking data from the markerless motion capture flowed straight into Unreal over a simple local subnet, with no need for house sync or genlock (though we would have for a larger experience). In essence, Unreal powered the magic, Rivermax carried the picture, and Pixera made it showtime.
Equipment Used
Media Server
Pixera two RS & Pixera four RS
Motion Capture
CapturyLive
