Building Photoreal Avatars for PR: Technical & Creative Lessons from Rudra

Immersive Tech

Pranay Bhandare

4 Min

Oct 31, 2025

When Disney+ Hotstar prepared to launch Rudra: The Edge of Darkness — a series starring Ajay Devgn in his digital debut — the goal wasn’t simply to announce another OTT release. It was to make audiences pause in an already saturated entertainment landscape and experience something genuinely new. To achieve that, Ink In Caps conceptualized and built a Web + VR metaverse experience that reshaped how entertainment PR could unfold — not through traditional red carpets or studio interviews, but through a live metaverse press conference featuring photoreal 3D avatars of the lead cast.

This wasn’t a stunt. It was a proof of how storytelling, technology, and real-time human engagement can merge to create lasting audience impact.

The Context: When Traditional Launches Hit a Ceiling

In the world of streaming, every week brings a major release. Media fatigue is real, fan attention fleeting, and differentiation harder than ever. The challenge before Ink In Caps was straightforward but immense: How do you create cultural conversation around a series premiere when every other title is vying for the same screen time?

The answer lay in designing an experience that didn’t just inform, but involved — where the celebrity, the press, and the fans could co-exist inside one shared, digital environment.

That’s where the Rudra Metaverse was born — a full-fledged, browser-accessible world combining photoreal characters, live interactivity, and the visual fidelity of a cinematic set.

The Core Challenge: Making a Live, Believable Celebrity Interaction Possible

Traditional press meets depend on physical presence — the visual, emotional, and human connection that live events naturally carry. Recreating that in a digital medium meant more than rendering a 3D model; it meant capturing the essence of Ajay Devgn — his presence, his speech rhythm, his subtle facial movements — and translating that into an avatar that felt alive.

At the time, off-the-shelf metaverse tools were nowhere near capable of such fidelity. Latency, body sync issues, and voice distortion were common barriers. To overcome this, the Ink In Caps team engineered their own custom infrastructure, tailoring every layer — from motion capture to audio mapping — for seamless real-time performance.

The Solution: Engineering a New Standard for Digital Presence

The Rudra project wasn’t about chasing a trend; it was about building something that worked at the level of television production, in a space still considered experimental. Here’s how Ink In Caps made it possible:

1. Photoreal 3D Avatar of Ajay Devgn

The foundation of the experience was a meticulously detailed avatar of Ajay Devgn. Every texture, micro-expression, and movement was studied and replicated to maintain authenticity. The model wasn’t just visually accurate — it carried precise lip-sync and full-body motion mapping that mirrored Devgn’s speech and gestures in real time.

This level of fidelity required custom motion capture calibration, enabling the avatar to convey not just sound, but intent. When the actor smiled, paused, or emphasized a point, the avatar responded accordingly.

2. The World’s First Metaverse Press Conference

Over a three-hour live session, avatars of journalists and the cast interacted inside the virtual environment. Reporters could ask questions, move around, and witness responses in real time. The experience was built both for desktop browsers and VR headsets, allowing wide accessibility without sacrificing immersion.

This was not a pre-recorded event — it was a genuine live interaction, the first of its kind for the entertainment industry.

3. Custom Infrastructure and Audio Stack

To support such a technically demanding environment, Ink In Caps built V-Conference, a proprietary real-time communication layer. It allowed high-fidelity audio transmission, minimal latency, and synchronized body movements between multiple users. Since available metaverse platforms weren’t capable of real-time broadcast quality, the team designed the entire backend from scratch — from voice handling pipelines to avatar synchronization systems.

This wasn’t merely an engineering exercise. It was an orchestration of software, design, and human performance — a blend where every millisecond of lag or mismatch could break immersion.

The Outcome: When Execution Meets Novelty

The Rudra Metaverse wasn’t just a technical win — it became a PR phenomenon.

Major media outlets like CNN-News18, India Today, and The Economic Times covered the launch extensively. Social reach surged organically, amplified by the novelty of a celebrity avatar interacting live with journalists.

But beyond coverage and clicks, the deeper outcome was how believability translated into engagement. By grounding innovation in precision — rather than hype — Ink In Caps demonstrated that immersive experiences could deliver measurable marketing impact.

The project went on to win multiple industry recognitions including:

FuTech Awards
WOW Asia
Marketers’ Excellence Awards

Each accolade wasn’t just for creativity, but for executional reliability — a rare combination in the experimental tech space.

Behind the Scenes: Lessons That Redefined Experiential PR

Every innovation brings its own learning curve. Rudra offered a few that continue to influence how experiential teams approach metaverse activations today.

1. Realism is Emotional, Not Just Visual

A 3D avatar can be technically perfect but emotionally flat. What worked in Rudra was the careful calibration between Devgn’s actual performance and the avatar’s response system. True realism emerged from how audiences felt while engaging — the subtle delay-free lip-sync, the authentic tonal inflections, the human rhythm of pauses.

2. Infrastructure Must Match the Experience

Many early metaverse events fail not because of creativity, but because of unstable systems underneath. The Rudra experience succeeded by prioritizing reliability — ensuring low-latency performance even with simultaneous user logins and real-time voice rendering.

3. PR Can Be Immersive, Not Just Informative

A metaverse event doesn’t replace a press release — it redefines it. Instead of journalists receiving information passively, they became part of the environment, asking questions, interacting, and co-creating the story. That participatory quality is what drove the event’s virality.

4. Build for Interaction, Not Exhibition

The Rudra metaverse wasn’t designed as a spectacle. It was built as a functional interaction platform — something that could sustain a live, multi-person dialogue over hours without breaking immersion. That focus on utility over novelty is what allowed it to transcend the “tech experiment” tag.

Why This Matters for Brand Leaders and Entertainment Marketers

In an era where audiences scroll past conventional campaigns, the Rudra Metaverse stands as a lesson in building experiences that earn attention through authenticity. For marketing leaders and studio heads, it signals a shift from content promotion to content participation.

For brand managers, it shows that immersive tech isn’t just for spectacle — it can deliver tangible, earned media results.
For production teams, it highlights the importance of custom infrastructure when existing tools fall short.

For creative directors, it reinforces that storytelling still sits at the core — technology is simply the canvas.

The Broader Takeaway: Immersion as Strategy

The Rudra Metaverse wasn’t about the metaverse itself. It was about reinventing connection — between celebrity and fan, brand and audience, story and medium. When done right, immersive experiences don’t feel like technology; they feel like presence.

And that’s what makes them powerful tools for modern communication — not because they’re new, but because they’re real enough to remember.

Closing Thought

The Rudra launch proved that digital engagement doesn’t have to sacrifice human emotion. It showed that meticulous craftsmanship — in avatars, infrastructure, and storytelling — can turn a promotional event into a shared moment of culture.

For brands looking to move beyond conventional outreach and into experiences that live on in public memory, this project remains a touchstone.

Ink In Caps continues to collaborate with studios, marketers, and innovation teams to design such immersive ecosystems — not for spectacle, but for meaningful, measurable impact that redefines how stories are told and experienced.

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