Nickelodeon’s ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Go Virtual at Comic-Con with NDI^®

The highlight of Comic-Con 2018 was a virtual reality (VR) experience placing journalists directly into the animated universe of Nickelodeon’s reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show. The thrilled journalists were able to chat live with Ninja Turtles Donatello (voiced by Josh Brenner) and Michelangelo (voiced by Brandon Mychel Smith).

The “Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Live” experience was the latest project from Nickelodeon’s cutting-edge Entertainment Lab launched last year to experiment with new and emerging technologies and broaden entertainment options for Nickelodeon’s audiences.

The Entertainment Lab team worked with Adobe^® Character Animator, Epic Unreal Engine and NewTek NDI^® to create the VR experience. NewTek NDI is a royalty free bi-directional IP technology for transport of video, audio, metadata and communications over standard networks. Character Animator and Unreal Engine both can send and receive NDI video streams, and animation playing on the Character Animator timeline can be used in live production in real time. This allowed the crew to take live video of visitors in the Experience’s custom built green screen cube set, combine that and the Character Animator output with environments in Unreal Engine, and stream out a live video where guests found themselves immersed in a virtual world with the Ninja Turtles. Via a Vive headset, visitors saw and conversed with the Ninja Turtles live. At the end of their VR experience they received a video of their virtual visit to take home.