“America’s Most Wanted,” after a decade of wrapping up its run-on Fox, is returning with an innovative storytelling technology. Elizabeth Vargas is hosting the show, which mixes life-size digital characters with AR overlays and a staple of the original show, climactic reenactments.

Filming at Illuminate Hollywood, the show’s set is developed by James Pearse Connelly to be a canvas for the AR elements overlaid throughout the broadcast while giving a police precinct sense. Faux storage racks and file boxes with light scallops encircle a high-tech workspace for the show’s main analysts of Yodit Tewolde and Paul Holes. While scattered throughout the space, various extras are highlighted, answering phones and working on cases.

Concerning technology, the studio comprises one vertical LED display, with the bulk of graphics appearing through augmented reality. The show is driven by Zero Density with rendering from the Unreal Engine. America’s Most Wanted’s AR was created by CGLA Studios.

The recreations of criminals from cold cases guess what they would look like today using age-progression tech while allowing Vargas and the analyst team to swap characteristics like beards and hairstyles promptly. Volumetric body scans and characters are very common in sports, but this is one of the first shows to leverage the tech for this kind of storytelling.

AR is also used for a floating criminal tracker and different information boxes. The graphics and the show’s central package channel the larger map from the original America’s Most Wanted set while making it very futuristic.

“America’s Most Wanted” show is produced by Fox Alternative Entertainment along with XG Productions.

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