Immersive Film Production Moves Beyond Headsets

Matthew Celia of Light Sail VR to Speak at NAB Show 2026 on Scaling Production Pipelines as New Revenue Paths Emerge

LOS ANGELES & LAS VEGAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#AppleVisionPro—Light Sail VR, a 2025 Emmy-winning immersive cinema studio, today announced that co-founder and Chief Creative Director Matthew Celia will speak at NAB Show 2026 in Las Vegas on how immersive film production is moving beyond headset-driven distribution and into production models that can scale across real-world workflows.

“As studios and brands continue to explore immersive formats, the industry is confronting a practical challenge,” said Celia. “Early excitement did not translate into reliable revenue. Now, production teams are rethinking how projects are built from the start to line up with how they will actually be distributed and monetized.”

From Headsets to Real-World Experiences

For much of the past decade, immersive content has been tied to headset adoption. That dependency limited distribution and made reliable revenue difficult to sustain. That is starting to change, as new formats expand how and where immersive content can be experienced, while headsets remain a core part of the business.

Studios, entertainment companies, and experience operators are expanding into location-based formats, including shared, ticketed experiences built for in-person audiences. At the same time, high-profile projects such as NASA’s Artemis II launch are highlighting where immersive formats deliver the most value in real-world moments.

“If you want to take IP and extend it across platforms, you have to think about that from the beginning,” added Celia. “You can’t retrofit it later.”

Why Production Pipelines Determine What Scales

Scaling immersive production is not only a creative challenge. It requires aligning with existing production workflows from pre-production through post.

As pipelines mature, teams are reducing cost per minute of production through automation, custom tooling, and AI-assisted workflows, while continuing to raise the bar on quality. What has held the category back is cumbersome workflows, limited tooling, and compute constraints, and that is beginning to shift.

This is also leading to more defined roles on set, as teams move from experimentation toward repeatable production models.

At the center of that shift is how projects are planned from the start, including:

• How content is captured.
• How assets are preserved.
• How projects move between formats.

Celia’s NAB session reflects lessons learned from more than a decade of immersive production work, including live and large-scale environments where execution must hold without a second take. He dives deep on the challenges faced when building an immersive post-production pipeline and how Light Sail VR has solved each problem in order to produce scaled content quickly. The session uses real-world examples from The Faceless Lady, Red Rocks: Live in VR, and SNL 50th Anniversary Special.

NAB Show 2026 Session Details

What: “Building an Immersive Video Post Production Pipeline”

A session on building production pipelines that hold up from set through post in immersive film and live production environments.

Where: Las Vegas Convention Center, Room N236/N238

When: Wednesday, April 22, 2026, 10:45-11:45 a.m. PT

About Light Sail VR

Light Sail VR is an immersive cinema company based in Los Angeles and founded in 2016 by Matthew Celia and Robert Watts. The team earned a 2025 Emmy for its work on the SNL 50th Anniversary Special in VR and has delivered more than 200 projects across narrative, live performance, and emerging media formats, including work for platforms such as Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest. The studio works with global entertainment and technology partners and focuses on building production systems that support immersive storytelling in real-world environments. For more information, visit https://lightsailvr.com/ and follow the company on LinkedIn.

Light Sail VR is a trademark of Light Sail VR. All other brands and solution names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Tags: NAB, Light Sail VR, immersive cinema, immersive video, immersive experience, film production, VR, virtual reality, XR, extended reality, cinematic storytelling, documentary, location-based, Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest, Emmy, Matthew Celia, Robert Watts

Contacts

Media Contact:
Dottie O’Rourke

TECHMarket for Light Sail VR

(650) 344-1260

LightSailVR@techmarket.com