Ten editions in, Venice Immersive has plenty to celebrate — just don’t expect the new-media showcase to spend much time looking back.
“We’re not planning any retrospectives,” Venice Immersive counselor Michel Reilhac says of this year’s landmark edition. “Instead, we want to focus on what’s happening next. This really feels like the beginning of a second chapter, for us and for the wider medium.”
Still, it’s impossible to mark the milestone without taking stock. What launched in a modest nook between two floors of the Palazzo del Casinò now occupies its own island in the lagoon — evolving from festival curiosity into a key hub for a protean art form.
The industry’s progress, meanwhile, has been anything but linear. The long-awaited consumer boom in personal headsets never quite materialized. Project financing from platforms and hardware makers contracted sharply as a result, and (mostly European) public funding stepped in as a bridge — though global profitability is now increasingly coming from elsewhere, as event-based spaces and collective exhibition models prove viable on their own terms.
“The location-based entertainment (LBE) model now drives the market,” says counselor Liz Rosenthal. “In Asia especially, we’ve seen an explosion of LBE centers built for scale, showcasing projects designed for groups of six, eight, 10 people up to hundreds, depending on the space. The storytelling and design have gotten far more sophisticated, too. In the past you weren’t really embodied as a character, and you couldn’t interact with objects or people. That’s changed.”
Competition titles like “Amsterdam 1652: The Hands of the City,” “Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience” and “Everest: The First Ascent” embody that shift, bringing free-roam, multiplayer experiences to educational and heritage venues. Their partners lend a degree of stability — and, increasingly, new sources of financing. “Smithsonian Starstruck,” for instance, was funded by Fever, the leading marketing and ticketing platform for immersive experiences worldwide.
“New models are starting to emerge,” Rosenthal says. “With Fever, we’re seeing private investment with distribution attached — they’re putting money into the production while also bringing the ticketing, marketing and audience infrastructure to the table.”
New actors are even rethinking existing models as immersive productions keep taking new shapes. In a certain light, the music experience “Bowie: Unseen | Unheard” could be seen as an artistic showcase underwritten by a hardware manufacturer eager to demonstrate its latest technology. Only here, that company is speaker maker L-Acoustics, and the project does away with headsets entirely — redefining immersive LBE around spatial sound.
“Sound is art, and we mean to showcase that,” says L-Acoustics exec Amber Mundinger. “It’s incredibly important to show the possibilities of how experiences can be delivered at the highest level of quality. A purpose-built space like the one created for Venice can be replicated around the world, giving people the same unique experience. The goal is to keep it intimate, with 20 to 30 people at a time living inside Bowie’s world while staying sonically true each time. That’s where LBE is heading.”
Indeed, the 30 projects selected for this year’s Venice Immersive competition illustrate just how far the ecosystem has expanded beyond tech. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is backing “Empire at Sea,” while human rights organization B’Tselem makes its first foray into production with “Raj’in (We Shall Return),” a 360-degree documentary following three Palestinian families in the West Bank. National film funds and co-production partners, meanwhile, have adapted traditional film-financing structures for XR — even turning arthouse éminences grises like Abderrahmane Sissako (“Artou”) into immersive evangelists.
For her part, director Hilde K. Kjøs is helping guide new institutional players into the fold. The filmmaker and photographer discovered VR during the pandemic, escaping lockdown through her headset and quickly getting hooked. She channeled that passion into “Finding Frida,” which casts the work of 19th century textile artist Frida Hansen into a dreamlike world. Notably, the project is also the first XR title supported by the Norwegian Film Institute.
“The film is about the importance of role models,” says Kjøs. “We hope it can show the way for other filmmakers coming from documentary and 2D, so we’re treating it more like a pilot than a prototype, effectively running out ahead, building structures and sharing knowledge about everything from pipelines to international distribution, so that the system can catch up. They can take a chance once, but the Norwegian Film Institute and other funders need to see projects succeed in order to come back and fund more.”
Projects featuring David Bowie, Daisy Ridley, Margot Robbie and Isabelle Huppert bring plenty of star power to this year’s Venice Immersive. But the festival’s biggest draw may turn out to be a pair of glasses that weigh next to nothing.
Enter the XREAL Aura, Google-powered AR smart glasses being positioned as a potential jolt for a sluggish headset market.
“These glasses overcome one of the main hurdles to global access,” says Venice Immersive counselor Michel Reilhac. “Previous VR headsets have always felt clunky and heavy. Now you get similar definition, color and contrast in something streamlined, lightweight, easy to carry and wear. They will define the next decade.”
Capitalizing on the buzz, festival organizers have partnered with Agog — the XR institute co-founded by Wendy Schmidt — to run a four-day “petting zoo,” where festivalgoers and industry delegates can drop in, no reservation required, to test the hardware. The Immersive competition will also feature two experiences built for the device: Andy Serkis’s “Nevatars,” starring Daisy Ridley, and the Margot Robbie-hosted “Galápagos: The Last Eden.”
“Most of what we’ve seen until now has been data- or sound-driven demos,” Reilhac says. “Whereas these two are fully fledged spatial narratives, with sophisticated storytelling and AI-driven voice activation that lets you talk directly to the characters. The magic is having that level of aesthetic and sonic quality in an ordinary pair of glasses. That’s a new wow effect.”
For “Galápagos” director Anthony Geffen, interactivity is the real breakthrough.
“You have to play to the medium’s strengths,” he says. “You’re not just watching Margot Robbie take you through the islands — you can reach out, engage with the world and see how the animals have changed. We even built a digital Darwin you can turn to at any point, and he’ll answer questions about his time there or anything else you want to know. That’s what makes this different from film, television or gaming.”
The abundance of boldface talent attached to this year’s projects is no accident. In a medium still defining its own identity, star appeal is a strategic.
“We’re still in Immersive’s Méliès or Edison era,” says industry veteran Peter Flaherty. “We’re building the grammar and syntax for an undefined art form — figuring out how to tell a story for eight to ten people at once, in an amorphous participatory experience, without alienating the audience. That’s why casting matters.”
For “Empire at Sea” — an AR drama that threads climate science into a propulsive narrative — Flaherty chose familiarity over megawatt fame, betting that veteran character actors like Orlando Jones and Beth Grant would do a better job onboarding viewers.
“That subconscious effect of recognizing someone without necessarily placing them makes the audience more comfortable with the storytelling,” Flaherty says. “It makes the experience less uncanny. Overall, leaning into familiarity is exactly where we need to be.”