Digital Humans startup ecosystem

3 3Lateral

3Lateral is a Novi Sad-based deep-tech studio that builds some of the most advanced digital human technology in the world, including high-fidelity facial rigging, performance capture, and AI-driven character animation pipelines used across games, film, and virtual production. Founded in 2004 by Vladimir Mastilović, the company became a go-to technical partner for AAA studios pushing the boundary of believable CG faces, and was acquired by Epic Games in 2019 to anchor what would become the MetaHuman Creator — the feature inside Unreal Engine that lets any developer ship production-grade photorealistic characters in hours instead of months. Even after the acquisition, 3Lateral continues to operate out of Serbia as a core R&D center for Epic's digital-human stack, making it one of the clearest examples of world-class computer-graphics IP built entirely in the former Yugoslav space and now shipped into tools used by hundreds of thousands of developers globally.