Carol Badaracco Padgett
Senior Staff Writer
Peter Provost can see things that aren’t there—yet. And he’s getting a name for it in the world of immersive entertainment and branded content, where companies are seeking him out for a taste of his expertise in designing architecturally inspired digital sets for virtual production.
Provost, owner of Atlanta-based Provost Studio, is an associate member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) based in Washington, D.C., and in his quest to design and build virtual production stages, he’s simultaneously a traditional architect, a future-facing architect of virtual environments, and an architect of change.
“My interest in architecture has always been placemaking … the experience of the space,” Provost says. “So for us to now develop immersive environments for video production is a natural extension.”
According to Provost, the first commercial XR stage was built in Beijing, China, over seven years ago. “It has taken that long to get over here,” he notes. As such, large media companies such as Fox Sports and ESPN were the only players utilizing the technology at first. But now, companies in other business sectors are increasingly taking note of the promise of using virtual content to support their brands.
To date, Provost Studio is experiencing the beginning of the movement here in the U.S., where companies are hiring his company to design and build their professional studios. There are two main areas in which his design services are being requested at this point: broadcast production for television (sports, election coverage, etc.) and advertising and marketing agencies that offer virtual production to their clients.
In his quest to serve these companies, and others, and their interest in creating branded content through virtual production, Provost says his firm is breaking new ground. “AV integrators are our competition,” he notes, not other traditional architects.
But just because a growing number of clients and potential clients are interested in creating a stage for virtual production, that doesn’t mean it’s not difficult to get the ball rolling toward actual adoption of the technology.
The challenge is that it’s difficult to educate potential clients, even those who know what an XR stage is and does, on how they might use an XR stage to their benefit in the first place. “It’s expensive,” Provost says, for one thing, to use (and create) virtual production environments.
So, while Provost and his XR content creator team are busy designing and creating sets for virtual production, a colleague at Provost Studio simultaneously devotes his time to educating clients and prospects about the new technology available to them and how it can work to their advantage. “We’re small and super scrappy,” Provost notes.
Provost Studio is also allied with a local team it put together that excels in Unreal Engine, the gaming software used to create the content used in virtual production spaces.
To this end, the firm has created a think tank of sorts, putting heads together with senior creatives and professors at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Midtown Atlanta, Georgia State University’s Creative Media Industries Institute (CMII) in downtown Atlanta, and others. Students, too, are part of the informal consortium because they latch onto the concept quicker than anyone else, and they’re hungry for education surrounding it that they can use for exciting careers moving forward.
“We’re working to grow the talent from the ground up,” Provost notes.
To date, that ground-up education looks like partnering with SCADpro (a collaborative design studio within the university), its professors and students, on a sports-branded XR experience for a major sports organization.
Provost also has an XR stage in Roswell, Georgia, alongside Signature Production Group SE, a studio and virtual production company that is helping fuel the architecture firm’s XR design offering and related creative collaborations.
“We’re sharing a space and using it to prototype content called the Content Kitchen that’s like an incubator for ideas,” Provost says. The space hosted a two-week design camp over the summer as a test to see how it could work, with a select number of students in attendance each week who utilized various science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills.
As part of the camp, design-minded students from Georgia-area schools were invited to the Content Kitchen for education on the many facets of virtual production. In the fall of 2025, Provost Studio also partnered with virtual production professors from Georgia State’s CMII, such as filmmaker and emerging technology specialist Jeasy Sehgal (Unreal Engine GOLD Authorized Instructor Partner), to present a masterclass on Unreal Engine that allowed students to see their work in a virtual environment.
When it comes to educating potential client companies and brands on the potential and the benefits of virtual production to help them market their brands, Provost says this about the Content Kitchen XR stage his team uses in Roswell: “We can prototype these environments and have people come in and see them in real time.”
Always circling back to students who will take the technology and run with it into the future, Provost says, “To have students come to the stage and see the application in real time—it helps students ‘get it,’ and it blows their minds.”
For all the talk of technology, though, Provost stresses that it’s the content that matters most.
“The most important thing is actually the content,” he notes. “What you are trying to communicate and what you are trying to get [the consumer]to experience. That’s why we do it. And that’s why our clients want to do it.”
This article appeared in the 2026 edition of the Creative Economy Journal. See more from the Journal here.
