Creating immersive VR and AR experiences often requires complex tools and specialist knowledge — slowing down the early stages of prototyping and limiting collaboration.
Realtime Stagemaker is a prototype toolkit designed to remove these barriers.
Built for Unity, it enables multi-disciplinary teams to work together in real time when developing early-stage 3D experiences. Two or more collaborators can inhabit the same virtual space simultaneously — one in-headset, another on desktop — co-designing, testing, and adjusting elements such as positioning, scale, and pacing as they go.
By simplifying workflows and reducing technical friction, Stagemaker allows creators to focus on ideas rather than tools — accelerating the journey from concept to prototype.
The system integrates directly within Unity and generates assets that can be easily transferred into professional pipelines for further development.
“One of the conditions that has changed in the digital era is the relationship between producers and consumers, and it’s a change with implications. Literally billions of people are creating their audio-visual stories on Facebook; 300 hours of video per minute are uploaded to YouTube; and new software solutions are appearing from the bottom up, rather than only being sold as tools on the marketplace. This new condition is a space where Anagram have a track record of innovation. As artists, they consistently think outside the box and manage to surprise even the most innovative sectors of the media art community in their rethinking of the artist-audience divide. Who better, then, to intervene in the tool-making process than artists who have mastered tools of the ‘off-the-shelf’ variety, who have experienced their limits, and who see alternatives to enhancing the creative process for themselves and others?
Stagemakers offers a plug-in that will transform Unity into a site of creative demonstration and conversation. It taps precisely those skills (film, immersive theatre, sound and interactive installation design, etc.) that set Amy and May apart from standard software developers, and that give this venture its promise to multidisciplinary creators in the real-time VR space.”
William Uricchio, American media scholar and Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
