QPORIT

 

The Venice Film Festival for many years has been one of the most exciting showplaces for displaying the current state of immersive theater and video.  This year seems to be one of most fully developed showcases yet, in terms of its scope and the sophistication of the presentations.  

There is a strong overlap between XR in a 3D headset and XR Live in immersive theater!

I have not been to Venice myself, and I am not going this year, so I asked Open AI ChatGPT to check what it can find out about this year's presentations from announcements, program listings and other sources. The report it came back with is interesting enough to share in its entirety. (AI does make mistakes, and I have no way to check everything it says.) In the following report Chat GPT refers to itself as "I"!

So this is an AI-Witness account of a Venice Immersive preview!

There are a few particularly interesting Venice Immersive items this year!

The timing is useful: September 1, was the press/industry preview, while the public Venice Immersive program begins September 2. So we are just at the point where actual eyewitness reports should start replacing promotional descriptions. Venice has 68 immersive projects from 26 countries, including 30 in competition; 22 of those are world premieres. (La Biennale di Venezia)

The projects I would watch most closely

Project	Why it looks unusually interesting
Bowie: Unseen | Unheard	This is already producing actual news from today's preview. It builds an immersive audiovisual environment from 800+ photographs of David Bowie, including unseen/rare images by his longtime tour photographer Denis O'Regan, combined with Bowie audio, O'Regan's recollections and a 60-speaker L-Acoustics L-ISA spatial-audio system. ANSA reported from today's press presentation, so this is no longer just an announcement. (Corriere della Sera)
Nevatars — Andy Serkis / Google	Potentially one of the most technologically consequential works. It's directed by Andy Serkis and Josh Nelson Youssef and produced by Serkis's Imaginarium, Boona, Google's 100 Zeros, and 3Dar. Rather than conventional headset cinema, it's a mixed-reality story in which characters occupy the viewer's physical room. The cast includes Daisy Ridley, Josh Gad, Kathleen Turner, Kelly Marie Tran and Serkis. It is explicitly about human creativity in an era when image generation has become easy—so there is an AI subtext as well as an XR one. (La Biennale di Venezia)
Galapagos: The Last Eden	Technically fascinating: Anthony Geffen says the Galápagos were captured in 16K 3D. The viewer can interact with animals and apparently converse with Charles Darwin inside the experience. Margot Robbie narrates. This is worth watching partly as a test of how far ultra-high-resolution stereoscopic capture plus interactive XR has progressed. (La Biennale di Venezia)
Empire at Sea	This one is especially relevant to the 4D/volumetric-video questions we've discussed. It is a mixed-reality/holographic episodic drama made with 4DV.ai, Flaherty Pictures and NightLight Labs, commissioned by Lincoln Center. Characters appear holographically in a solarpunk story about scientists building a sustainable city on an oil rig. The creators explicitly describe it as using “breakthrough holographic technology.” (La Biennale di Venezia)
Out of the Ashes	Nonny de la Peña—the pioneer of immersive journalism—and Rory Mitchell reconstruct the 2025 Los Angeles fires spatially. Their production pipeline includes 3D scanning, Gaussian splatting/3DGS and 4DGS, turning real fire devastation and survivors' stories into an immersive documentary. That combination of journalism + spatial capture + recent historical reconstruction makes it one of the projects I'd particularly want to see. (Venice Production Bridge)
Solwata	An unusually sophisticated physical/virtual documentary. It follows Solomon Islands communities facing relocation from sea-level rise. Participants move between physical and virtual environments, reach into real water and handle physical cultural objects while wearing the headset. It's made by NowHere Media with Human Rights Watch and Agog and narrated by Mark Ruffalo. (Human Rights Watch)
Smithsonian Starstruck	A large-scale free-roaming VR astronomy experience built from actual Smithsonian/NASA/ESA astronomical data. Instead of merely presenting rendered space imagery, it turns scientific datasets into navigable 3D space. There's also a dedicated September 6 technical/creative presentation with the director, Smithsonian astrophysicist Randall Smith and the development lead. (Smithsonian Folklife Festival)
Disneynature's Wolf	Disney/Silverback are using immersive filmmaking to place the viewer alongside filmmakers interacting with wild Arctic wolves on Ellesmere Island. This matters because Disney appears to be testing immersive documentary as a companion format to mainstream Disney+ nature programming rather than treating XR as an isolated experimental medium. (La Biennale di Venezia)

Two politically/documentarily important projects also deserve attention. Raj'in (We Shall Return) uses 360° cinematography together with phone and handycam footage shot by Palestinians and activists to document displacement of Palestinian communities in the West Bank; given the political focus of this year's larger Venice festival, it could become one of the most discussed works. (B'Tselem) Finding Frida, meanwhile, creates a dreamlike VR environment from the textile work of Norwegian artist Frida Hansen and is the first Norwegian VR project selected for Venice's official immersive competition. (NFI)

But the conference/program presentations may be almost as interesting as the experiences

For someone interested in where XR is actually going technically and commercially, there are several unusually good sessions.

September 3–6: “The Smart Glasses Petting Zoo.” This is not just a panel. Agog is assembling multiple current smart-glasses models for hands-on comparison, with experts available to discuss them. That could produce useful intelligence about whether XR storytelling is really shifting from enclosed VR headsets toward lighter spatial glasses. (Agog)

September 3: “LBXR eXchange: Unlocking Interoperability.” This sounds dry, but it addresses one of XR's biggest practical problems: location-based experiences tend to be one-off systems. UNIVRSE/XRoam and Small Creative/OnSite are discussing interoperability. If they are proposing a genuine common deployment layer, that could be significant for distributing immersive experiences to venues. (Venice Production Bridge)

September 4: 14 unfinished immersive projects pitch for financing. Venice's Gap-Financing Market presents 14 selected XR projects publicly before they enter meetings with producers and financiers. This is often more revealing about where the field will be in 12–24 months than the finished competition, because these are projects currently looking for money. (Venice Production Bridge)

September 5: Virtual production + VFX + AI + immersive. Sony, HAI and EDI are doing a session specifically on the convergence of virtual production, VFX, AI, production design and immersive experiences. That is probably the program session I would watch most carefully for AI/XR production developments. (Venice Production Bridge)

September 6: Canon on spatial video. Canon's “Created Different, an Immersive Future” presents case studies in VR and spatial-video documentary production, including the actual creative and technical production choices. Given Canon's camera/lens involvement in stereoscopic VR capture, this could contain useful production information rather than just theory. (Venice Production Bridge)

September 6: Smithsonian Starstruck technical panel. This one should get into how the project converts real astronomical data into a commercially deployable free-roam VR experience. (Venice Production Bridge)

And one business session may be surprisingly important: “Beyond Technology: Immersive Experiences as a Global Cultural Market,” September 7. Its argument is that immersive has become a market spanning VR, performance, museums, food, festivals, hybrid venues, brands and AI—and that the European model is becoming distinctly different from Silicon Valley's individual, at-home headset model. That is very close to the underlying question of whether XR can become a sustainable media/venue business rather than simply a hardware category. (Venice Production Bridge)

What I think is the real 2026 Venice Immersive story:

I'm seeing three trends in the program that are more interesting than “here are some new VR movies.”

First, the headset is no longer the medium. Venice is mixing VR headsets, XR glasses, smart glasses, mixed reality, free-roam spaces, physical props, volumetric/holographic performers, spatial audio and live experiences. Venice itself now explicitly defines the section as encompassing immersive video, VR/MR, virtual worlds and installations. (La Biennale di Venezia)

Second, captured reality is getting much richer: 16K stereoscopic nature footage in Galapagos; spatial reconstruction and Gaussian splatting in Out of the Ashes; volumetric/holographic actors in Empire at Sea; real astronomical datasets in Starstruck. Those are substantially different approaches to the same problem: how do we put reality—not merely CGI—into navigable 3D space?

Third, large institutions are moving in: Google, Disney, Smithsonian, Lincoln Center, Canon, Sony, Human Rights Watch and major entertainment talent are all represented. That's a stronger industrial signal than another collection of experimental Quest projects.

 

 

Labels: immersive theater, Venice Immersive, Venice International Film Festival, XR