Puget Systems Unveils Immersive Robo Dojo, AI-Powered Workflows, and Advanced Real-Time Production Solutions at SIGGRAPH 2026

Puget Systems, a leader in high-performance workstations for content creators and engineers, is set to make a significant impact at SIGGRAPH 2026, showcasing a robust suite of innovations that span immersive experiences, AI-driven content creation, and real-time virtual production. Occupying booth #557, the company, in collaboration with esteemed partners like Form Studios, Beeble AI, District Cinema, PNY Technologies, Volinga, and AMD, will demonstrate how its cutting-edge hardware is empowering the next generation of digital artists and technologists. From an interactive "Robo Dojo" challenging attendees to fight AI robots as MetaHumans to advanced demonstrations of AI-generated relighting and 3D Gaussian Splatting, Puget Systems is poised to highlight the practical applications and profound implications of emerging technologies in the media and entertainment industry. This extensive presence underscores Puget Systems’ commitment to pushing the boundaries of what is possible in computer graphics and interactive techniques, offering a glimpse into the future of creative workflows and immersive storytelling.

The Robo Dojo: An Immersive Battle Against the Machines

At the heart of Puget Systems’ SIGGRAPH 2026 exhibit lies "The Robo Dojo," an ambitious and highly interactive experience developed in partnership with Form Studios. This immersive activation invites SIGGRAPH attendees to step into a futuristic arena as fully-realized MetaHumans, confronting swarms of AI robots in a cinematic game environment. The core concept, "fight back against the machines," is not merely a narrative hook but a compelling demonstration of advanced real-time motion capture and rendering capabilities.

Participants are transformed into digital avatars, with their physical body movements controlling a MetaHuman character in real time. This seamless integration of physical action and virtual representation is made possible through innovative LiDAR scanning technology and a large LED volume. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology provides precise, real-time spatial mapping, capturing the participant’s movements with remarkable accuracy. This data is then fed into the system, animating the MetaHuman avatar within the LED volume, which acts as a dynamic, responsive digital set. The LED volume, a staple in modern virtual production, allows for the creation of photorealistic environments that react instantly to changes in perspective and action, blurring the lines between the physical and digital realms. Each combatant’s performance is scored, fostering a competitive spirit, with the top warrior each day earning a special prize, adding an extra layer of engagement to the experience.

This year’s "Robo Dojo" builds upon the success of Form Studios’ "Rage Room" experience from last year’s SIGGRAPH conference. While the "Rage Room" relied on a camera-heavy MoCap (Motion Capture) rig, the "Robo Dojo" represents an evolution towards a leaner, more efficient setup. Form Studios has transitioned to a single-sensor LiDAR system, significantly simplifying deployment and reducing hardware complexity without compromising accuracy or immersion. This technological refinement is a testament to the rapid advancements in motion capture and virtual production, emphasizing ease of use and scalability. For those less inclined to engage in virtual combat, the full technology setup behind "The Robo Dojo" will be on display within the Puget Systems booth, offering a detailed look at the engineering and creative innovation underpinning this interactive spectacle. This exhibit serves as a powerful illustration of how gaming principles are converging with cinematic production techniques, creating new paradigms for interactive entertainment and virtual experiences.

Pioneering AI-Powered Relighting for "Son of a Dungeon" Season 3

Beyond immersive gameplay, Puget Systems is also spotlighting groundbreaking advancements in AI-driven post-production workflows. In partnership with PNY Technologies, Beeble AI, and District Cinema, the booth will host a demonstration focused on the lighting workflow behind Corridor Crew’s highly anticipated "Son of a Dungeon Season 3." This presentation will illustrate how AI-generated relighting and physically based rendering (PBR) passes can be seamlessly integrated into Unreal Engine, revolutionizing traditional post-production pipelines.

The demonstration will feature Beeble Studio’s SwitchLight 3, a cutting-edge tool designed to generate production-ready PBR passes from native 4K cinematic footage. PBR, a methodology that renders graphics in a way that more accurately models how light interacts with surfaces, is crucial for achieving photorealistic results in digital environments. SwitchLight 3’s ability to automate the creation of these passes significantly streamlines the relighting process, which historically has been a time-consuming and labor-intensive aspect of visual effects. Attendees will witness firsthand how these meticulously generated PBR passes are imported into Unreal Engine, enabling high-quality, real-time rendering on a Puget Systems workstation. This capability empowers filmmakers and VFX artists to iterate on lighting designs with unprecedented speed and flexibility, achieving cinematic quality in real time.

The demonstration will be led by Patrick Stoebenau of District Cinema, a key collaborator with Sam Gorski of Corridor Crew on the development of the Unreal Engine plugin that facilitates this advanced workflow. This partnership highlights the collaborative nature of innovation within the industry, where software developers, content creators, and hardware manufacturers work in concert to push technological boundaries. The demanding workflow, characterized by complex calculations and high data throughput, will be powered by a Puget Systems workstation equipped with an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition GPU. The NVIDIA Blackwell architecture represents the forefront of GPU technology, offering immense processing power crucial for accelerating AI tasks, real-time rendering, and complex simulations. This powerful hardware ensures that artists can handle the most intensive creative demands without compromising performance, marking a significant leap forward in efficiency and creative control for virtual production.

Advancing Spatial Computing: 4D Gaussian Splat Integration with Volinga

Further expanding its technological showcase, Puget Systems is hosting Volinga, a pioneering platform in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) technology. This collaboration will feature an Unreal Engine scene incorporating Gaussian Splat, demonstrating its transformative potential for creating immersive 3D environments. 3D Gaussian Splatting is a novel rendering technique that represents 3D scenes as a collection of anisotropic Gaussians, offering highly efficient and photorealistic rendering from sparse input data like photos or videos.

Volinga’s mission is to democratize 3DGS technology, making it accessible to professionals across various sectors, including Media & Entertainment, Product Visualization, and Simulation & Training. The Volinga Suite, a standalone application, allows users to create, train, and edit splats independently of traditional 3D software. These versatile assets can then be seamlessly integrated into industry-standard applications such as Nuke and Houdini, renowned for their compositing and procedural generation capabilities, respectively. Critically, the Volinga Plugin for Unreal Engine provides additional tools for relighting and further editing within the real-time engine environment.

The implications of 3DGS, particularly with Volinga’s accessible platform, are profound. It enables the rapid generation of highly detailed and photorealistic 3D environments from real-world captures, significantly reducing the time and resources traditionally required for asset creation. This technology has the potential to revolutionize virtual set creation, digital twin development, and the production of immersive experiences by providing a fast, high-fidelity method for digitizing reality. Puget Systems’ role in hosting this demonstration underscores the critical need for powerful workstations capable of handling the intensive computational demands of 3DGS, ensuring smooth workflows and real-time interaction with these complex spatial datasets.

Next-Generation Rendering: Keyshot Studio with AMD Power

Puget Systems will also highlight its prowess in high-performance rendering by showcasing the capabilities of AMD’s cutting-edge hardware in Keyshot Studio. This demonstration will feature the formidable combination of an AMD Threadripper PRO 9000 WX-Series processor paired with four of AMD’s Radeon AI PRO R9700 GPUs. This configuration represents a pinnacle of workstation power, designed to tackle the most demanding rendering and visualization tasks with unparalleled speed and efficiency.

The focus of this Keyshot Studio presentation will be an innovative new workflow leveraging "AI Shots." This feature allows users to utilize generative AI to introduce focused changes to an image while meticulously respecting existing CAD data, lighting conditions, and perspective. Generative AI, in this context, intelligently understands the context of the 3D scene, enabling designers to explore variations, generate alternative textures, or modify scene elements with a high degree of consistency. This capability significantly improves the consistency and quality of end results, as the AI ensures that generated elements harmoniously blend with the original design parameters.

For product visualization, industrial design, and marketing content creation, the integration of AI Shots offers a revolutionary approach to iteration and refinement. Designers can rapidly experiment with different looks and finishes, drastically shortening the design cycle and enhancing creative exploration. The power of the AMD Threadripper PRO processor, known for its high core count and multi-threaded performance, combined with the AI acceleration capabilities of the Radeon AI PRO R9700 GPUs, provides the computational backbone necessary to execute these complex generative AI tasks in a timely and responsive manner. This demonstration underscores Puget Systems’ commitment to integrating leading-edge hardware with advanced software tools to deliver transformative solutions for creative professionals.

Beyond the Puget Systems Booth: District Cinema’s "Roll for Reality"

Puget Systems’ influence at SIGGRAPH 2026 extends beyond its dedicated booth, with significant collaborations enhancing other activations on the show floor. Notably, District Cinema’s "Roll for Reality" will be a standout demonstration of the future of interactive storytelling. This live Dungeons & Dragons show represents a groundbreaking fusion of traditional tabletop roleplaying, spontaneous improvised acting, advanced motion capture, and sophisticated real-time virtual production.

Puget Systems and NVIDIA are collaborating to provide the high-performance hardware infrastructure required to power this ambitious real-time show. The project explores how live improvisation, collaborative tabletop role-playing, and complex real-time rendering pipelines can be unified into a cohesive and interactive storytelling medium. Performers, seated at a physical table, engage in an epic fantasy narrative, their actions and dialogue driving the progression of the story. Crucially, their interactions are simultaneously interpreted and rendered into a vibrant digital world, displayed live for the audience on a large-scale LED screen. Motion capture technology captures the performers’ movements and expressions, animating digital avatars or influencing virtual environments in real time.

"Roll for Reality" is more than just a performance; it is an experimental platform pushing the boundaries of live entertainment and interactive media. It showcases the immense potential of virtual production to create dynamic, unscripted narratives that engage audiences in unprecedented ways. The computational demands of such a system – integrating multiple data streams, real-time rendering of complex 3D environments, and dynamic lighting – necessitate the robust, high-performance workstations provided by Puget Systems, leveraging the graphical processing power of NVIDIA GPUs. This collaborative effort exemplifies the cutting-edge applications of real-time technology in blurring the lines between live performance, gaming, and cinematic production.

Thought Leadership: Jon Bach on Workstation Evolution

Further solidifying its role as an industry thought leader, Puget Systems President Jon Bach will lead a Birds of a Feather discussion for SIGGRAPH attendees titled "Workstations: From the Desk to the Datacenter." This session offers a unique opportunity for attendees to engage in an active and insightful discussion about the evolving landscape of computing infrastructure for creative and technical professionals.

Scheduled for Monday, July 20, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM in room 512, Bach’s session will explore the entire spectrum of workstation solutions. The discussion will cover traditional deskside workstations, which remain the backbone for many individual artists and developers, extending to more centralized solutions like rackmount systems, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and cloud-based platforms. Bach will delve into a comprehensive comparison of common tools and deployment models, meticulously outlining the strengths and tradeoffs inherent in each approach. This analysis is crucial for organizations making strategic decisions about their computing infrastructure, balancing performance, scalability, cost, and accessibility.

A particularly timely aspect of the discussion will be an examination of how the recent "AI boom" and global memory shortages are significantly impacting infrastructure decisions. The explosion in AI-driven workflows necessitates greater computational power and specialized hardware, while memory supply chain constraints pose challenges for both individual workstations and data center deployments. Bach will facilitate an open discussion on where workflows are headed in response to these dynamics and where the long-term equilibrium between local and centralized computing might settle. This session is an invaluable resource for industry professionals, IT managers, and creative studio leaders seeking to navigate the complex technological landscape and make informed decisions for future-proofing their operations.

In conclusion, Puget Systems’ presence at SIGGRAPH 2026 is a comprehensive demonstration of its pivotal role in advancing computer graphics and interactive techniques. From empowering immersive experiences like "The Robo Dojo" to showcasing the efficiency of AI-powered post-production with Beeble AI and District Cinema, and facilitating cutting-edge spatial computing with Volinga and high-performance rendering with AMD, Puget Systems is at the forefront of technological innovation. The company’s commitment to supporting complex virtual production workflows, exemplified by "Roll for Reality," and its thought leadership, highlighted by Jon Bach’s session, underscore its dedication to the evolution of digital content creation. Attendees are strongly encouraged to visit booth #557 and participate in the various demonstrations and discussions to experience firsthand how Puget Systems is shaping the future of the industry. For additional details on Puget Systems’ extensive presence at SIGGRAPH 2026, interested parties can follow the provided link on their official website.