Just returned from a great trip exploring immersive storytelling at Venice Immersive and Ars Electronica in Linz, the latter also as part of a delegation of Dutch artistic research projects organised by CIIIC and the Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie

It was great to join Venice Immersive as it celebrated its tenth anniversary as a structural programme within the larger film festival. Which raises the question: what does it actually mean to have gone through a decade of innovation and experimentation, moving from an original focus on virtual reality to the much broader category of immersive arts and media?

Has immersive storytelling matured by now, like a fine Barolo, showing off its complex and well-developed flavours after a decade of fermentation? Or is it entering adolescence, breaking loose from its upbringing in cinematic tradition and slowly building its own identity? Or should we measure the past decade in “internet time,” where fast-moving hype cycles may have already pushed immersive past its prime?

There is certainly something to be said for the last option. Meta has all but shut down the Metaverse, the Apple Vision Pro has yet to take off, and on the artistic side of the field, makers and producers are still struggling to find sustainable exhibition cultures.

But then again, a more mature market does seem to be taking shape. In Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills mall, teamLab draws millions of visitors into its generative worlds. In Las Vegas, the Sphere has taken in over a billion dollars in revenue. More than 200 VR showcases have popped up across China. In Europe, Fever and Excurio have been touring shows across the continent.

Yes, that’s more in the realm of shopping-mall entertainment and theme parks than art-house cinema. But it does point to growing public interest in the medium and growing technical maturity, while festivals like Venice or IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam show there’s also a lot of artistically strong work being made.

Emerging exhibition cultures

One of the main questions running through the field is how we should understand XR as a medium. Where the main Venice Film Festival has found its place in cinema’s larger universe (mostly art-house and indie fare with a touch of red-carpet glamour), Venice Immersive shows that in XR, the future is still wide open. Or more precisely: that there likely won’t be a single future, but several parallel paths.

I’ve tried to capture some of what I saw across a range of “exhibition cultures,” by which I mean a combination of XR productions, venues, distribution channels, financing structures, supporting institutions, and audience expectations and practices (see also my earlier post on this after last year’s Rotterdam Film Festival). We’ve coined this term in our Shared Realities research project, as a way to better grasp the ecosystems needed to make this sector a viable and sustainable one.

Here’s my list, very much a work in progress.

VR Cinema

360 degrees (or sometimes also 180) cinema, the OG of immersive, still has a strong showing at the festival. These are the traditional pieces, where the viewer sits down on a stool – or presumably at home on the couch – teleported to a virtual experience that takes place around him or her.

In this genre, I particularly liked the contemplative desert landscapes of Artou, made by veteran filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako, and Ôl (Haunts), a Welsh production that channels 90s-childhood nostalgia through dreamy 360 sequences of teenage hangouts at often marginal sites like bus stops.

The festival also showed two productions for the emerging AR-glasses platforms: Nevatars and Galapagos: The Last Eden, the latter a David Attenborough-style nature documentary carried by the star power of Margot Robbie as narrator.

Interestingly, many of these works are fairly linear, without much interaction. The few interactive moments added to the Galapagos documentary felt like they were mostly there to show off the new device’s capabilities, rather than adding a meaningful layer to the story. I didn’t miss the interaction at all (if anything I found it slightly distracting), whereas the 360 VR did add a spatial sensation beyond the cinema screen.

Exhibition and income could run through app stores or streaming platforms, or through distributors like Diversion(France) and Nu:Reality, who organise collective VR screenings in cinemas. The open question is whether headsets and AR glasses will be adopted by wider audiences as a higher-definition, more immersive way of watching cinematic content. Headset sales are still modest, and AR glasses are too new to predict.

Art Installations

Two or three pieces I saw at Venice Immersive could just as easily have been shown at the Art Biennale on Venice’s main island, or as an art installation in public space.

The White Saboteur is a dreamy yet confronting installation that makes the viewer complicit in the melting of a glacial world: wherever participants look, icebergs floating in the ocean start to disappear. The landscape evolves throughout the day, with each new viewer contributing to a further disappearance of the polar landscape. The piece invites reflection on our own role in climate change, and on the more systemic conditions behind it.

Celine Daeman’s Nothing to See Here is a great piece for public spaces (in the Netherlands it has been installed in a train station hall) that invites passers-by to look into a small box through stereoscopic viewing holes. There, they see themselves looking into that same box, filmed from above. A series of small events then unfold in the viewing box that are absent from the viewer’s real surroundings, producing an eerie, strange feeling that ultimately raises questions about the nature of reality, and how much of it is a shared construct.

Author-driven works like these, which invite reflection on the world around us, seem well suited for art exhibitions or public space, and could plausibly be financed by art funds or digital-culture funds.

Location Based Entertainment

LBE, or Location Based Entertainment, was a popular genre at the festival: VR or projection-mapping works designed to be watched at a dedicated location, for instance as part of a museum exhibit, a shopping mall, or a tourist destination. The works I saw in Venice took the form of a “guided tour” or “expedition” in VR, where visitors follow one or more main characters along a track, with several stations along the way where part of the narrative or ‘explanimation’ takes place.

At the festival, we could walk through a 1652 version of Amsterdam, join the Hillary expedition to Mount Everest (told partly from the perspective of lead sherpa Tenzing Norgay), or take a tour through galaxies far, far away.

In terms of genre, I’d place these works closer to an educational family outing, a theme-park ride, or a museum exhibit than to art-house cinema. These experiences were designed for small groups, around three or four people, with new groups entering the track every five or ten minutes, guaranteeing a steady throughput.

This could be a viable exhibition format, whether as part of a museum or as a stand-alone destination, like Amsterdam’s recently opened ENTR museum.

Maximize image

Edit image

Delete image

Maximize image

Edit image

Delete image

Embodied, explorative and spatial storytelling (?)

Related to LBE, here’s a category I’m not entirely sure how to name, or where to place institutionally, since it’s more of a newly emerging genre native to XR. Work in this category resembles both VR-cinema and LBE. It is spatial and location based like LBE, but more in the domain of art house cinema than museum or shopping mall. It also resembles Cinematic VR, but its more spatial and embodied in its experience. Rather than watching from a swiveling stool in your VR goggles, you experience it in a space you can walk through, choosing your own position from which to watch the drama unfold.

Jury member Paul Raphael put it well, describing the qualities of these works:

“Beyond UX, there’s a physicality to this medium that doesn’t really exist in cinema,” he reflects, arguing that what VR does is closer to immersive theatre, architecture, or sculpture than to cinema. “Painting, photography, film have spatiality within the frame, but not spatiality relative to the person’s own body. A lot of the pieces here are exploring spatiality, physicality and movement in genuinely interesting ways, and I’m glad to see it.”

The Pigeon Ring is an XR kammerspiel set in an abandoned Chinese apartment that still bears traces of its former inhabitants: a few scattered pieces of old furniture on a concrete floor, a few half-torn certificates or awards still hanging on the wall.

A young woman and her grandfather enter the apartment, and a series of memories from their shared past there begin to play out. What I found clever is that as a viewer, I could walk around the apartment in the present, while the memories were projected into adjacent virtual spaces I couldn’t physically enter. They exist somewhere out there, not quite in the here and now, in a place I can’t directly access, yet I still had to walk through the apartment to get a proper sense of them: walking up to a door standing ajar and peeking through the gap, or bending my knees to watch a memory play out in the reflection of a TV screen.

Little by little, the empty apartment fills with memories that illuminate the complex relationship between granddaughter and grandfather. The design of the physical set also plays with the relationship between the abstract, geometric idea of physical space and the stories or experiences of place that give it meaning and attachment. The physical set, visible before the viewer puts on the headset, consists of white blocks of translucent fabric: an even more abstract representation of the space, one that the experience then fills with the memories and stories that give it meaning.

Being in You was another favourite. It tells the story of the late musician (and geologist) Cat Janice, who addresses the viewer as if they were close friends, perhaps even lovers, from when she was still alive. It makes clever use of mixed reality and reverses one of VR’s core tenets, that you experience the world through someone else’s eyes: here, the protagonist, through recordings, asks whether she can become part of you. It was a tremendously touching work; as the blurb puts it, “a tender duet between the living and the no-longer-living, an intimate encounter with the digital afterlife, holding someone’s echo of existence.”

This category overlaps partly with LBE. The difference lies less not in the technology or storytelling format but in the context and audience for which it’s shown. Where I’d place LBE closer to high-throughput entertainment or education, these examples of embodied and spatial storytelling lean more toward art-house territory, and likely need different models for financing, distribution and audience development.

These were, in my view, some of the best work XR has to offer from an artistic standpoint, yet it’s still hard to see how this category could grow into a sustainable exhibition culture. Single-player experiences like these have very low throughput: Being in You could accommodate 18 viewers over a 12-hour day; The Pigeon Ring, only ten.

At the same time, some cultural spaces are starting to embrace this kind of programming. Phi in Montreal, the Undershed in Bristol, and the Wales Millennium Centre have all begun programming and ticketing XR works. Some are also exploring whether they could commission new work collaboratively, or agree on shared standards that would make touring these works easier. Still, the question of how to open such work up to larger audiences remains. And since the spatial exploration is so central to these projects, it will also be difficult to watch them in a head set at home.

Performative Arts

Interestingly, there were hardly any pieces from the domain of theatre and the performing arts this year. Last year brought works like the hybrid theatre experience Blur, the XR dance performance L’Ombre, the immersive group experience Ancestors, and the “automated play” Constantinopolidad. These works resemble format s close to that of the performing arts, sometimes with actors, sometimes with audiences following a performative script and becoming part of the work themselves. They can also be experienced much like a theatre play: you buy a ticket, show up at a set time, and experience the performance together with others.

I only saw one work that fit this category: Shifting Connections, a playful collective choreography piece that draws players into an abstract world, guiding them into playful movement by having them grab a series of golden balls, with the relationships between players visualised as shifting sets of vectors. I quite enjoyed it: it started as a playful experience and slowly grew into something more like a collective performance, perhaps even a ritual. Towards the end, the makers also played with the relationship between the abstract world of representation and the concrete world our headset-bound bodies move through, by introducing a set of see-through windows through which the real world became visible inside the XR world.

There should be more interesting work in this lineage of XR. At Ars Electronica, I met people who pointed me toward work being made at the Academy for Theatre and Digitality in Dortmund, and the Chaos Festival for immersive theatre taking place next weekend in Germany. The Dutch Innovationlab.nu also has a strong link to the theatre world. Perhaps this branch of immersive work has found a firmer footing within theatre itself, or perhaps it’s simply too complex, production-wise, to show in Venice. I missed it, since I usually enjoy this category a lot, but then again, Venice is a film festival after all.

XR for Good / Impact

A final category worth naming here is what we might call VR for Good, or VR for Impact (there’s probably a better name for it). Work in this category is built on the idea that XR, more than other media, has a particular capacity to engage people with societal issues. Most of us have probably moved past the “empathy machine” framing by now, but there’s still good evidence that XR does make different perspectives on the world palpable and emotionally accessible.

Work in this category could be funded by NGOs or governments and deployed as part of larger campaigns: aimed at broad festival audiences, tailor-made for thought leaders and decision-makers, or used in participatory processes around urban planning or climate engagement.

At Venice 2026, the project Solwata fits this lens. Made possible by Human Rights Watch and Agog, it tells the story of rising sea levels in the Solomon Islands through the personal testimonies of some of its inhabitants.

Between categories

Two more works I truly enjoyed in Venice, though I’m not sure what exhibition culture could bring them to larger audiences.

The first is the genuinely moving documentary Out of the Ashes, made as a monument to the devastating fires that ravaged Los Angeles in January 2025. The work consists of high-res scans of the areas hit by the fire. From a map, visitors can select an actual house that was destroyed and zoom in on a personal story told by its former inhabitants. What struck me was the dramaturgy: inside the burnt landscape, each destroyed house was represented by an abstract outline, and at times that outline was given texture by photos from a family album. Within the blackened surroundings, we’d see a snapshot of a family dinner in the kitchen, or a birthday celebrated in the dining room. Between the high-res documentation of the neighbourhood and the abstract outline of the house itself, these images brought shreds of memory to life, at the very place they were once made.

I’m not entirely sure how to categorise this piece. It’s partly VR cinema you could watch from a stool, but it also has an embodied dimension, since it lets you spatially explore the area, albeit virtually, not by moving your body but by moving the cursor. The work was also presented as a spatial installation, framed by two walls showing projections of the devastated neighbourhoods, accompanied by a set of headsets through which passers-by could listen to audio versions of the interviews. I could easily see this as a museum installation, at a documentary festival, or as a monument in a community centre, library or city hall.

A last work worth highlighting is Empire at Sea, by far the most technologically innovative piece I saw. The setup consisted of a large physical table with lights built into its surface. Eight participants stood around it, each wearing an Apple Vision Pro as AR glasses, showing a hologram of a large ship surfacing above the table. The ship carried the survivors of a major climate-related tsunami that had destroyed Los Angeles, in a solarpunk setting, and we watched its inhabitants as they faced an important decision. In the first part, we could walk around the table and look into different rooms of the ship, as if it were a dollhouse, with different scenes unfolding in each room. What struck me was that in VR you’re usually placed at the centre of the piece, with the world unfolding around you; here, the table itself was the centre (thanks to Kees Driessen for pointing this out), and we walked around the scene instead, so making it more like watching a theatrical exhibit. Later, the perspective shifted, and the table became the centerpiece of a meeting, with the main characters standing life-sized around it, among the viewers of the work.

This one, too, could fit several exhibition cultures. It had a theatrical quality and could easily be programmed in a theatre context. It overlapped clearly with embodied and spatial XR, given how we could walk around the scene. And there was a touch of XR-for-impact too, since the story was clearly built to prompt reflection on climate change.

To conclude

That some of this work resists categorisation says something about how dynamic the field still is. So indeed more the youthful energy and experimentation of adolescence than a mature cultural field. But certainly not past its prime.

Ten years in, it’s still a medium in full development, moving in several directions at once, and there are likely more categories still to name. I haven’t touched, for instance, on the growing interest among planetaria worldwide in showing creative XR work. Or for instance on the overlap with gaming and online social worlds.

My aim here wasn’t to arrive at a definitive taxonomy, but to find a lens for discussing what I’ve called exhibition cultures: the funding structures, distribution channels, venues, genres and types of work that, together, could make this field viable in the long run. And perhaps also to start looking for crossovers: what would it take for an intimate work of embodied, spatial storytelling to be reshaped for another exhibition culture, a planetarium, say, or an LBE format, allowing for higher throughput?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

This is edition #8 of my irregularly appearing newsletter in which I reflect on Civic Interaction Design. With our AUAS - Civic Interaction Design Research Group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, we explore how design & technology can contribute to civic life: the numerous and varied interactions through which people in a society come together to strive towards collective well-being. My own interests include the design and societal implications of digital media platforms, hybrid public spaces & urban culture, XR storytelling, media architecture, and democracy.

I want to move this newsletter to the open web. If you'd like to follow me, please join me there and subscribe at www.martijndewaal.nl