Ten editions in, Venice Immersive has plenty to celebrate — just don’t expect the new-media showcase to spend much time looking back.
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 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.”
“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.”
“Finding Frida”
The lineup:
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.
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.”
“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.”
