Crunchyroll wanted visitors to walk out of the real world and into an anime. I built the Unreal Engine 5.3 scene behind the full-scale LED portal, a walk-through tunnel Sony installed on-site using their latest LED wall hardware, first at The Loop in LA and later at Anime Expo, also in LA.
The Brief
Crunchyroll wanted visitors to walk between two worlds: a real forest, quiet and grounded, and an anime dimension packed floor to ceiling with references to the shows. Visitors would step from one into the other, spend time in the anime world, then watch it fold back into the forest, looping for as long as the activation ran.
It had to launch as two worlds and grow past two. Crunchyroll wanted the freedom to add new worlds later, on their own schedule, without a rebuild each time.
My Role
I owned the content end to end. I modeled custom 3D assets for the environments, then set dressed each scene with those builds and pre-built assets Crunchyroll delivered. I rigged and animated Crunchyroll's IP assets and dropped them into the world, so the anime dimension read as one dense mashup of characters pulled straight from the shows.
I designed the worlds themselves, from the calm of the forest to the density of the anime dimension, working with Crunchyroll's design team and art director to check every asset against the source material. I built the systems underneath the creative work too: the logic that moved visitors between worlds, kept every screen in sync, and held up hour after hour in front of a live crowd.
Built to Grow
I built the experience as a modular system. Adding a new world means designing it and dropping it into the portal; it takes its place in the rotation without touching anything that already works. What launched as a loop between two worlds became a foundation Crunchyroll could keep building on long after opening day. The transitions between worlds run clean, with no flicker and no jump in content.
I worked with Sony's team to build the setup that feeds every screen at once, in sync, panel to panel. That foundation let the experience travel to a different venue later, with a completely different screen layout, and run as if it had been built for that space from the start.
The Transition
The moment between worlds needed its own identity. I built a custom Niagara particle system from scratch, paired with custom shaders that shape the particles' behavior as they sweep across the portal and dissolve one world into the next.
I hid a handful of easter eggs in that transition: visual nods to specific anime IP, tucked into the particle detail for anyone paying close attention as they pass through.
Sound
The audio team handled sound design. I worked with them on a file delivery format that locked their audio to the experience automatically, even as the timing of each world shifted during development.
Offline Rendering
I built a second mode into the same system: offline rendering. Switch it on and the experience writes to disk as a video file, at any resolution or frame rate, instead of running out to the screens. Both modes share the same foundation, so a design change made once updates the live install and the rendered output together. Nothing drifts out of sync, and I never made the same fix twice.
Bringing the Experience to a New Venue
By the time development wrapped, the modular system had already paid for itself. Crunchyroll brought the portal to a new venue, this time across two different LED setups: one wide screen, and a tall, narrow display closer to a ticker tape. Both ran the same content from the same project, with new screen configurations dropped in and a handful of settings tuned to fit. Crunchyroll also asked for a standard 16:9 cut for presentations, and that came together the same way.
Test capture. Any drift between the two LED systems comes from on-location hardware sync, not the content.
Result
Crunchyroll now has a living experience that travels to any screen and any venue, and adapts in days rather than months. They're already talking about adding more worlds and more ways for visitors to interact with it.
