In the split second when a UFC fighter lands a decisive strike or a championship esports player pulls off a match-winning move, millions of viewers around the world are locked into the moment. For decades, broadcasters and advertisers have struggled with the same dilemma: How do you monetize those moments without disrupting them?
For Erhan Ciris, the answer was not incremental improvement to advertising, but building new infrastructure for live video.
Ciris, founder and CEO of 4D Sight, has built his career focused on complex real-time perception challenges.. Long before real-time artificial intelligence became a mainstream talking point, Ciris was working on perception systems capable of understanding complex environments at broadcast speed. That technical curiosity ultimately led to the development of US Patent 11,270,517, a foundational system designed to dynamically insert supplemental content into live video streams.
“My journey has always centered on solving the hardest perception problems in real time,” Ciris said during a recent interview about his career. “If you can teach machines to understand environments that are constantly changing, you open the door to entirely new creative and commercial possibilities.”
That vision became the backbone of 4D Sight, a New York City-based technology company building what Ciris calls a “Perception Layer” for live video. The platform allows broadcasters and rights holders to insert photorealistic virtual advertising into live broadcasts without physical hardware or onsite staff , a capability that challenges decades of legacy production workflows.
Ciris describes his entrepreneurial philosophy as the ability to transform engineering concepts that initially appear impossible into infrastructure that global organizations can rely on. That mindset was sharpened during his time with the UC Berkeley SkyDeck program, where he refined both the technical and commercial viability of his early prototypes.
“The SkyDeck experience forced us to translate deep-tech research into something that could operate reliably in live broadcast environments ,” he said. “That was the turning point where 4D Sight evolved from an engineering experiment into a real business.”
Since launching the company in 2020, Ciris has led 4D Sight through rapid growth, securing multi-year partnerships with Tier 1 sports and esports organizations, including TKO, which owns the UFC and WWE, as well as Riot Games. The partnerships validated his belief that spatial intelligence could reshape how live content is produced, distributed, and monetized.
However, Ciris insists his motivation was never purely commercial. The company’s earliest inspiration emerged from frustration with how advertising disrupted viewer engagement.
“The original idea came from competitive gaming,” Ciris said. “Fans were being pulled out of the experience by intrusive ads that cluttered the screen. I believed that if we could solve the problem in esports, where speed and complexity are extreme, the technology would scale everywhere.”
After proving the technology in gaming environments, 4D Sight expanded into traditional sports in 2023 through a landmark partnership with TKO. The move demonstrated that the company’s AI could operate inside high-intensity live-action broadcasts with broadcast-grade visual accuracy
Traditional in-stream advertising relies heavily on overlay graphics, banner ads, or commercial interruptions. Erhan Ciris believed those methods treated video as a flat surface rather than a dynamic environment.
4D Sight approaches the challenge differently. Using AI-driven computer vision, the company’s platform interprets the geometry, motion, and lighting of a live broadcast in real time. The system then integrates advertising elements directly into the environment, allowing them to appear as natural parts of the scene.
“Our technology acts as a real-time spatial understanding layer.,” Ciris said. “Instead of placing stickers on a broadcast, we embed photorealistic assets into the physical space of the event.”
The company’s cloud-based infrastructure is one of its defining features. Unlike legacy systems that rely on sensors, on-site hardware, and manual calibration, 4D Sight processes live feeds remotely, often with latency under couple of milliseconds.
The platform is capable of adjusting to unconventional camera angles, drone shots, or rapid motion sequences, scenarios that have historically challenged virtual advertising technology.
“Our AI is designed to be self-adapting ,” Ciris said. “It can adapt to unpredictable production environments without requiring manual reconfiguration.”
While monetization remains a driving force behind the company’s success, Ciris emphasizes that 4D Sight operates under a philosophy he calls “Respectful Noninterruptive Advertising.” The principle focuses on enhancing viewer engagement rather than interrupting it.
“Technology should enhance the spectator experience, not detract from it,” Ciris said. “If advertising disrupts the integrity of the event, everyone loses.”
The company follows three core guidelines when integrating virtual content into live broadcasts. First, assets must feel naturally embedded in the environment. Second, advertising cannot interfere with gameplay or viewer comprehension. Third, content must remain culturally and legally appropriate for each viewing region.
Ciris believes this approach aligns with broader industry shifts toward personalized and context-aware media experiences. As global audiences diversify, advertisers face increasing pressure to deliver targeted messaging without sacrificing authenticity.
“The future of media is about relevance,” Ciris said. “Showing the right message to the right audience, while preserving the authenticity of the event, is the only sustainable path forward.”
Ciris said one of 4D Sight’s most significant contributions to the media industry extends beyond advertising placement and into reshaping how sports leagues, broadcasters, and rights holders approach revenue strategy. Rather than simply offering new ad inventory, the company’s technology operates as an extension of commercial sales teams, allowing organizations to extract greater value from broadcast environments they already control.
“We’re not just creating ad space,” Ciris said. “We’re helping rights holders unlock yield from environments that historically couldn’t be monetized at scale.”
4D Sight operates on a dual-revenue platform that supports both infrastructure licensing and monetization enablement, allowing partners to expand global sponsorship opportunities without requiring changes to existing production workflows. That flexibility has helped the company secure partnerships with major leagues and media organizations that often operate under strict confidentiality agreements, a reality Ciris views as a sign of the industry’s growing reliance on spatial intelligence technologies.
“In our industry, being trusted with live broadcast environments under NDA is the ultimate validation,” he said. “It means partners view our technology as mission-critical to their most valuable content.”
Ciris attributes much of that trust to the company’s engineering culture. Many members of the 4D Sight team come from backgrounds in autonomous robotics, UAV navigation systems, and synthetic aperture radar imaging, technical fields where reliability, precision, and real-time decision making are essential.
“We treat live media as infrastructure that requires reliability and precision.
The company’s location in New York City has also played a strategic role in shaping that vision. Positioned at the crossroads of finance, media, and sports, Ciris operates within close proximity to major leagues, agencies, and production partners.
“New York rewards precision and performance,” he said. “The pace of this city reflects the demands of Tier 1 broadcasting, where reliability and execution are non-negotiable.”
Ciris sees virtual advertising as only the first phase of a much larger transformation. The Perception Layer developed by 4D Sight is designed to support multimodal creative infrastructure, allowing AI to interact with video content using a wide range of reference inputs, including spatial context, brand assets, historical footage, and live video.
“In the future, reference material becomes the interface,” Ciris said. “Creators and broadcasters will collaborate with AI systems that understand not just pixels, but geometry, motion, and narrative context.”
This shift would allow broadcasters to modify, remix, or extend live scenes in real time without altering existing production workflows. Ciris believes the evolution represents a move away from overlay-driven advertising toward spatially integrated content creation.
“Most people think the future is better overlays or faster rendering,” he said. “The real future is spatial understanding. If AI cannot reason about environments in three dimensions, it will always feel artificial.”
As live media continues to evolve, Ciris believes spatial intelligence will redefine how audiences interact with content and how organizations monetize it. For him, the goal extends beyond business growth. It is about building infrastructure capable of reshaping storytelling itself.
“We are moving toward a world where AI collaborates with humans to modify reality frame by frame,” Ciris said. “As AI gains spatial awareness, new creative and commercial workflows become possible.”
For Ciris, that future is not theoretical. It is already unfolding in stadiums, arenas, and digital broadcasts around the world, one frame at a time.
