Building a Fortnite World Live from a Museum Floor | Unreal Fest Chicago 2026

In September 2025, Immersive Enterprise Laboratories partnered with the Fleet Science Center in San Diego to create The Science of Animation, a three-day pop-up experience that transformed a museum floor into a fully operational, real-time animation studio.

This session recorded at Unreal Fest Chicago 2026 takes you behind the scenes of that experience—not as a showcase of finished content, but as an exploration of how animation actually works when art, science, and technology collide in real time.

Rather than presenting animation as a linear pipeline, the exhibit invited visitors to step directly into the process. Guests designed characters, explored how drawings become 3D models, learned how rigs and facial systems function, performed motion capture, and watched their movements drive animated characters live on screen.

This talk breaks down how the experience was designed, built, and operated. Watch to learn how real-time engines, motion capture, AI-assisted animation, and procedural systems were combined into a single responsive environment capable of running continuously in a public setting.

Beyond the technology, the session explores what this experiment revealed about learning and storytelling. The talk concludes by looking ahead at how this approach scales into immersive education, live entertainment, theme parks, and real-time storytelling platforms—highlighting why the future of animation is not something you simply watch, but something you step into.

Find out more about using Unreal Engine for animation here: unrealengine.com/uses/animation

#Animation, #ImmersiveEnterpriseLaboratories, #FleetScienceCenter, #UnrealEngine, #UnrealFestChicago2026