Showplus and Disguise build on tradition for CCTV's New Year’s celebrations in China

New Year’s Eve is one of the biggest nights of the year around the globe. Though China may save its biggest celebrations for the lunar new year, a few weeks later, hundreds of millions of people still tune in annually to the China Media Group (CMG) broadcast. The transition into 2025 was as big as ever, being shown across multiple China Central Television (CCTV) channels, including CCTV-1 and the broadcaster’s 8K Ultra HD channel, CCTV-8K, and various other media platforms.

The show, Sail into 2025, would be a late contender for one of the most-watched programmes of the year, and CMG turned to extended reality (XR) experts Showplus to realise their ambitious vision, with help from Disguise.

The Challenge

With hundreds of millions of viewers and their work set to be broadcast in Ultra HD on CCTV-8K, Showplus understood that every second of the work would need to meet the audience’s expectations for a memorable spectacle.

The sequences that the team would be working on were varied, taking audiences from an off-planet interstellar observatory to a palatial hall for informative segments on the ancient dams of a village in Tai’an, the way ancient relics can share the wisdom of our ancestors, and the integration of traditional culture and modern art through dance.

The team worked day and night for 480 hours over twenty days to determine how XR technology could create the most captivating sequences from these varied ideas.

The Solution

With conventional broadcasting tools, capturing the grandeur of an imagined palace or the near-infinite expanse of space is nearly impossible. Enabling your cast to wander through these scenes freely is an even bigger challenge. For Zeyu Zhang, CEO of Showplus, XR was the obvious solution.

“Our extensive use of XR virtual technology expanded the physical stage through virtual means,” Zhang says, “creating a world that combines the virtual and the real. By designing diverse XR scenes, the program broke through traditional stage spatial limitations, creating a virtual and real entertainment world.”

The broadcast employed Disguise’s XR tools to deliver real-time rendering and diverse scenes to enhance the immersive experience. After settling on their ambitious vision for the project, the team began developing virtual scenes using Unreal Engine 5 for rendering. A 10x5 meter LED vertical screen and an 8x6.5 meter LED floor screen created a 100-square-meter virtual space for shooting. In conjunction with Disguise media servers, virtual scenes were rendered as though they had been shot by virtual cameras. Disguise’s spatial positioning and tracking system ensured that everyone onscreen was perfectly integrated into the picture.

The Result

The impact was immeasurable, allowing actors in the virtual observatory to interact spontaneously with elements of their surroundings. In other sequences, the scenery itself seemed to interact with the cast: a dancer picks a lone leaf from the ground, and, in an instant, the world around him changes. He is no longer in a grand hall but instead in an abstract, natural space.

The final sequences, as featured in the Sail into 2025 broadcast, are spectacular and varied, and no small feat for the team to achieve in just twenty days.

The intergalactic performance, titled ‘Constellation Fantasia’, was a particular highlight for Zhang. “We utilised XR technology to create a futuristic starry sky,” he says. “By extending our virtual set skyward, the performance enveloped the audience in a technologically rich celestial environment, transforming the physical stage into a bridge connecting the future world with the present. This immersive experience showcased the allure of China's advanced manufacturing capabilities through striking virtual visuals.” 

The sequences produced by Showplus for Sail into 2025 are all the more remarkable for relying so heavily on real-time rendering in a show watched by hundreds of millions of people. The team’s willingness to lean on the technology demonstrated how much faith they were willing to put into the tech they used and, in turn, how much faith CMG had in Showplus to deliver something that lived up to their expectations.

But then, a precedent had been set. It is fitting that a show filled with celebrations of tradition was continuing a new one: the collaboration between China’s biggest broadcaster and Showplus, who have also delivered major XR sequences for previous New Year’s Eve galas hosted on CCTV. Delivering breathtaking annual extravaganzas through groundbreaking technology has become a new tradition for Showplus, and the only question the team ever have on their minds is how to top the show next year.