The first time Erhan Ciris really thought about advertising, he was watching a movie.
Not a commercial. Not a banner ad. A film. And somewhere in the scene, a brand appeared so naturally that he almost missed it. A bottle on a counter. A logo on a jacket. It was there, but it never asked for his attention. It just belonged.
That stuck with him. The best product placements in cinema have always worked because they respect the story. They exist inside the world rather than on top of it. Nobody pauses a film to complain about a coffee cup that happens to be facing the camera. It feels real because it lives in the scene.
Years later, when virtual reality and new digital platforms started emerging, Ciris kept coming back to that idea. The advertising models following these platforms into the future were the same ones that had dominated television for decades: mid-roll interruptions, overlay banners, pop-ups. Formats designed to grab your attention by taking it away from the thing you actually came to watch.
In a live UFC fight or a competitive esports match, that tradeoff is even more obvious. A single second can shift momentum. Viewers are locked in. When something breaks that focus, you feel it.
Erhan Ciris founded 4D Sight because he believed there was a better model. Not better interruptive ads. No ads that interrupt at all. An invisible layer of monetization that lives inside the broadcast the way a prop lives inside a film. Native. Spatial. Noninterruptive.
The Idea Behind 4D Sight’s Perception Layer
The concept at the core of 4D Sight is what Ciris and his team call a Perception Layer. If you can teach AI to understand the three-dimensional space inside a live broadcast as it unfolds, you can place branded content directly into the environment so that it looks and behaves like a natural part of the scene.
Instead of treating a broadcast as a flat screen to stick graphics on, 4D Sight’s system interprets geometry, depth, lighting, and motion in real time. The result is photorealistic virtual content that appears as though it physically exists in the venue. No on-site hardware. No manual setup. Everything runs in the cloud.
4D Sight’s deep learning research began back in 2020, well before real-time AI became a mainstream topic. That head start gave Ciris and his team the time and space to build something that actually works under the pressure of live television, where there is no room for visible mistakes.
Why It Matters for Fans, Leagues, and Brands
The advertising industry has spent decades optimizing for attention capture. Louder. Bigger. More frequent. But live sports audiences are not looking for content to browse. They are watching something they care about in real time. The rules are different.
What Erhan Ciris built at 4D Sight is guided by a principle he calls Respectful Noninterruptive Advertising. It comes down to three things: the content has to feel like a natural part of the environment, it cannot interfere with the competition or the viewer’s ability to follow the action, and it has to be appropriate for the region where it is being shown.
That last point matters more than people realize. A single live event can air in dozens of countries simultaneously, each with its own regulations and cultural expectations. 4D Sight’s platform lets the same physical surface show different branded content in different markets at the same time, all without changing the broadcast feed.
For rights holders, that means new revenue from inventory that already exists. For fans, it means the experience stays intact. And for brands, it means showing up in the right context without becoming the thing people complain about on social media.
As Ciris puts it, film taught him what good brand integration should feel like. AI gave 4D Sight the ability to do it at broadcast scale, live, across the globe, frame by frame.
