Traveling through time and space with dreamlike visuals, National Treasure Performance Season — a cultural relic exploration program produced by CMG (China Media Group) and CCTV Documentary International Media Co., Ltd. — has been broadcast every Saturday at 19:30 on CCTV-3 since October 23, 2021. The show is presented with brand-new XR visual effects powered by EXCO VISION’s best-selling Apollo XR Series high-definition displays.

Adopting an innovative and performance-oriented style, the new season invites artists and enthusiasts to create and perform for national treasures, building a spectacular art feast for cultural relics.

Since 2017, National Treasure has run for three seasons. From its launch, the creative team has regarded it not merely as a TV program but as an “IP universe” to nurture. Leveraging the vast potential of cultural relics and museums activated by the show, the team has developed a series of spin-offs beyond the main series, including National Treasure Concert, short video series National Treasure Guardians on CCTV.com, audio program National Treasure Discovery Season online, and video program Treasure Proof on CCTV.

National Treasure Performance Season is the brand-new derivative weekly program created under this “National Treasure Universe” framework. It grows from the original National Treasure and creatively upgrades its core expression logic.

The stage design inherits the philosophy of previous seasons — “Seeing heaven and earth within an inch”. The creative team insists on using the most concise concepts and visual images as the spatial carrier for performances, striking a rational balance between production cost control and visual creative expression.

The large stage space is a 45° cubic space formed by three LED display surfaces provided by EXCO Vision, serving as the anchor of the visual space. For fixed camera angles, multimedia imaging delivers dynamic XR or naked-eye 3D visual spaces to meet the complex and personalized design needs of the program.

The three angled LED screens integrate seamlessly with virtual technology, forming a vast “National Treasure Universe Box World”. In the visual system of national treasures, the “National Treasure Box” is an indispensable symbolic element, so the entire visual design is rooted in the concept of “box”. Viewers can see the “box” take diverse and dynamic forms in art performances; cultural relics are sealed and frozen in time in the “National Treasure Box”; in the induction ceremony, the landing of the “National Treasure Box” resonates with thousands of notes, traveling through time and space.

By connecting physical screens with virtual technology, the visual design team breaks physical limitations, unlocks infinite visual possibilities, and creates an immersive space blending reality and virtuality.

Applying virtual production to a variety show stage is a significant challenge for any XR technical team. First, using LED screens for background content output supports up to 22-bit color channels, delivering finer pixels and more precise color expression, laying a solid foundation for color calibration in XR shooting.

National Treasure Performance Season marks the first use of XR technology in the National Treasure Universe series. For cultural relic performances, XR technology expands the visual space, requiring special camera positions to fully utilize its advantages. It presents the virtual space from multiple perspectives, conveys the seamless transformation between physical stage and virtual visuals, strengthens the visual connection with cultural relics, and immerses the audience in the wonder of the show.