We watched many fantastic XR, VR, and mixed reality projects at 2026 Venice Immersive, the Extended Reality strand of the Venice Film Festival!
The XR – Extended Reality strand of the Venice Film Festival is always an exciting and anticipated component of the festival. This year marked the 10th anniversary of Venice Immersive, and the selection of Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, virtual worlds, and immersive experiences showcased on the Lazzaretto Island didn’t disappoint. Venice Immersive 2026 brought us a total of 68 projects from 26 countries, with various forms of creative XR expression. We saw 10 projects, and they all stood out to us for different reasons. Read the list of experiences we watched at the 2026 Venice Immersive – from VR and MR to immersive films and experiences – in alphabetical order!
Bowie: Unseen | Unheard
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creators: Denis O’Regan, Nick Ryan, Joe Crossley
Runtime: 25’
Type of experience: Immersive installation
What you’ll like the most about Bowie: Unseen | Unheard – especially if you’re a Bowie fan – is getting access to many previously unseen images of the singer-songwriter taken by music photographer Denis O’Regan. O’Regan narrates the experience, telling us about how he first met Bowie, ended up following him on tour, and gained access to a side of him that not many got to see.
Still, this is one of those projects that sounded a lot better on paper than what it turned out to be. The experience itself doesn’t require a headset: a small group of people is seated at the center of a room, with one medium-sized horizontal screen in front of them and smaller vertical screens on either side. As you watch, the images appear on all screens as we hear the narration, with an additional soundscape – consisting of both Bowie songs and original compositions by band member Mike Garson – provided by sound designer and composer Nick Ryan through immersive spatial audio technology L-ISA.
The issue with this kind of setup is that it’s hard to really pay attention to the photographs when so much is happening at the same time, and on multiple screens – some of which will be at least partly hidden by people’s heads, depending on where you’re sitting. The main screen at the front is more visible, but it’s way too small and too far away for Bowie: Unseen | Unheard to truly feel immersive. As I watched, I couldn’t help wondering if this kind of story would have worked better as an exhibition, which would have allowed visitors to spend as much time as they wanted on each photograph while still finding out more about Denis O’Regan’s fascinating anecdotes. Still, the project does pick up the rhythm at the end, with an energetic finale that’s more about Bowie than it is about O’Regan, which the singer’s fans will love.
Disneynature’s Wolf: An Immersive Experience
Venice Immersive: Competition
Director: Jeff Wilson
Runtime: 20′
Type of experience: 180° Immersive film
Disneynature’s Wolf: An Immersive Experience takes us to Ellesmere Island, Canada, where the wildlife filmmakers of Silverback Productions go to observe the landscape and the Arctic wolves who live there. But the experience – which was created as a companion piece to Disneynature’s Wolf, out on Earth Day 2027 on Disney Plus – does a lot more than that. From the start, we watch the filmmakers as they approach this new environment and familiarize ourselves with their routine. They tell us about the responsibility they feel when approaching the wolves, as they are representing the human race to wild animals. Soon, we notice the wolves don’t really care about them, at first: after all, humans aren’t the centre of the universe, like one of the filmmakers explains.
But the longer they spend with the wolves, and us with them, the more something begins to change, and trust is slowly established. These interactions are the highlight of Disneynature’s Wolf, as it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to experience these bonds as they are created, and even have wolves sniffing you up close and maintaining eye contact. But finding out more about what takes place behind the scenes – from how they achieved that kind of trust to the kind of equipment it takes to film it – is just as captivating.
The Apple Vision Pro lets you experience it all in high resolution, which makes it a very immersive experience, though it is a shame that this wasn’t developed as a 360° experience, which would have been even more spectacular. Still, this was one of our favorite experiences in Venice and it’s not to be missed!
Empire at Sea
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creator: Peter Flaherty
Runtime: 22′
Type of experience: Installation, Mixed Reality
The winner of the 2026 Venice Immersive Achievement Prize is a fascinating mixed reality installation that places a small group of players around the table where the story will eventually unfold, first a little at a time and then with a series of more urgent events as our characters are faced with a timely dilemma.
At first, this story would appear to be about a daughter who lost her mom, and who’s using recordings of her to help her find out who she is and what her place in the world should be. Soon, we learn we’re on a remote oil rig, whose inhabitants are climate scientists who had moved there for their summer sabbatical to attempt to create a sustainable city at sea, but had been unable to return to the mainland after it was completely wiped out.
What makes Empire At Sea stand out is the very inventive way in which it tells this story, first focusing on portions of the oil rig, with players moving around the table to watch from multiple angles, and then surprising us by expanding the characters’ world into ours, making us full participants in it. If you were in these characters’ situations and someone was trying to make contact, what would you do? And who should get to decide about the future of humanity? These are some of the questions approached by Empire At Sea, an experience that’s ultimately about climate change, but that never forgets about the father-daughter relationship at its core. Venice showed us the first episode in an episodic drama; we can’t wait to find out what happens next.
Honeyboys
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creator: Tibor de Jong
Runtime: 36′
Type of experience: Virtual Reality
You might need to experience Honeyboys multiple times before you’re able to understand everything in it, but that doesn’t make it any less visually stunning and thematically intriguing. It’s hard to describe this experience because so much happens in those thirty-six minutes, as we follow a naked delivery boy through a world of consumerism, excess, birth, death, and overall insanity.
The worldbuilding is so impressive here. Every single frame is filled with immense creativity, and even if you won’t understand every single scene in it (the image of a six-boobed woman delivering a child to a sleazy businessman while saying “ohhh-ihhh-uhhh” is forever etched into my brain), its message couldn’t be clearer. Honeyboys is ultimately a very on-point analysis of desire, exploitation, privilege, sex, and the carnival of our entire existence. It’s an ode to those who refuse to conform to a society that treats us as products to be consumed, even if it leads to unbearable loneliness. This gorgeous, poignant virtual reality project establishes Tibor de Jong as a creator to watch.
Nevatars
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creators: Andy Serkis, Josh Nelson Youssef
Runtime: 31’
Type of experience: XR glasses, Installation, Interactive
Aya is a young aspiring artist who one day made the decision to hide her more quirky creations in a folder that no one will ever see, and only show the world a select few projects that she thinks people will like more. One day, her newest “perfect” character is accidentally dropped into her “Nevatars” folder, and that’s where our journey begins. Nevatars drops us in the folder too, and we come face to face with the gorgeous, inventive creations of Aya’s youth. We watch as they try to escape to a more visible folder, and ultimately come face to face with Aya herself just when she needs them the most.
Storytelling-wise, Nevatars doesn’t have any particularly surprising twists: if you think you know where it’s going, you’re probably right. But what this XR installation does have is a lot of heart, and you can feel that as you watch what is essentially an ode to creation, because no matter how flawed it is, it comes from us. Nevatars was made with love, and you can tell that the people who made it – from the creative team to the voice actors, including Josh Gad, Daisy Ridley, Leah Bateman, Steven Zahn, Kathleen Turner, Kelly Marie Tran, Aisling Bea, Andy Serkis, and Daniel Floren – had as much fun with it as you will have watching it. Especially in our day and age, a project that reminds young people of the importance of creating couldn’t be more essential.
Nox
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creator: Rio Nakada
Runtime: 20′
Type of experience: Virtual reality, Installation
Rio Nakada’s Nox starts with a rebirth of sorts, though it’s a life that’s more concerned with death. We follow a figure that takes many shapes, and we try to understand what it is: is it a person? Is it a soul? Is it all taking place in someone’s head? Every single viewer will have a different answer to these questions, depending on their own experiences. The project is based on Nakada’s own experience of complex PTSD, and meant to explore psychological states such as identity fragmentation, depersonalization, and Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. To me, it felt a lot like experiencing depression at its most soul-crushing, and eventually learning to accept one’s anxiety as a part of oneself, which should be listened to and not feared.
Visually, Nox is gorgeous, and the interactive moments – in which your hands become transparent, almost in a liquid way, and you’ll be able to touch and move things around – further help convey the isolation you’re meant to experience in this installation. There’s also some very vivid, memorable imagery, from a circle of mirrors meant to give the character’s voices a face to a hand coming down from the sky to suddenly crush the protagonist, and more. I found the voiceover a bit didactic, and often found myself wondering if it would have been better to just let viewers experience this without necessarily telling them what to feel. Still, this is a very personal project that succeeds at giving trauma a face, and that you’ll find yourself thinking about for a long time.
Out of the Ashes
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creator: Rory Mitchell, Nonny De La Peña
Runtime: 26′
Type of experience: Virtual Reality, Installation, Interactive
Out of the Ashes explores the aftermath of the January 7, 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles, which destroyed 16,000 homes and displaced more than 100,000 people. Creators Rory Mitchell and Nonny De La Peña use spatial technology to take us to two areas, the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, and let us decide where to start listening. In each area, we listen to stories of people who lost their homes, and as we watch them talk, the scale model of what it looks like today materializes. We’re able to move the model however we like, exploring various areas of their houses, with reconstructions of each room and even the people who lived in them, who soon start appearing both inside and outside of the model to highlight what each space meant to them.
But it’s more than that. Ted Porter remembers leaving to buy bread – like he and his wife used to do – before the fires destroyed his home. Karl Baumann (also one of Out of the Ashes‘s designers) explains that the red door in his childhood house had always symbolized safety to him, before taking us through what happened when he realized that it was all gone, and showing us how it was all rebuilt. Cellist David Low, who, as a surfer who knows how to interpret wind movements, had an idea of what was about to happen, recalls telling his son that no one was allowed to panic, before instructing him to choose some things from his room that he was going to save and driving away with him.
It’s with these incredibly human stories that Out of the Ashes tells a tale about collective grief, and shows us what suddenly losing one’s home actually means. At the same time, the experience also urges us to do better for the environment, ending with Landscape Architect Esther Margulies educating us about our need to plant climate-adaptive trees right now in order to improve our quality of life in the future. Impressive both visually and thematically, Out of the Ashes was our favorite experience at this year’s Venice Immersive.
Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creator: Elliott Mizroch
Runtime: 38′
Type of experience: Virtual Reality, Installation
Smithsonian Starstruck is a free-roam virtual reality work created in partnership with the Smithsonian with data from NASA, ESA, Hubble, JWST, Chandra, and the Parker Solar Probe. It was conceived as an educational experience, and as that, it works really well. You and the other participants are given a headset each, and when you put it on, you can see everyone in VR too, each with the name of a planet on their head. You are then taken on a tour where you get to see planets, stars, satellites and telescopes, and learn about what you’re seeing. There are interactive parts that involve you touching things to find out more about them, or picking up objects. Overall, it’s an enjoyable experience that finds fun ways to teach you fascinating things about the universe.
The room where the installation was set up in Venice was quite small, and even in a group of four people, it did feel quite cramped as we kept bumping into each other or into walls, and we weren’t always able to read the informational parts, but this wouldn’t be an issue in a bigger room. As someone who saw Eliza McNitt’s Spheres back in 2018, my main issue with Smithsonian Starstruck is that it’s not as immersive and spectacular as McNitt’s work was, which made me wonder if Elliott Mizroch’s installation would have worked better as a 360° film instead of an interactive, standing one. Still, Spheres set a very high bar for space-set VR works, and if you take it for what it is, you’ll enjoy Smithsonian Starstruck.
Tomori
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creator: Misa Haru
Runtime: 20′
Type of experience: Mixed Reality, Installation
Misa Haru’s mixed reality installation starts with you putting on the headset before you enter a room with a sign that reads ‘therapy room’ on the door. Inside, you’ll find a chair, and sitting on it will lead to a therapy session that will take you back to the protagonist’s past, eventually leading to a realization.
Tomori is a fascinating project, mainly thanks to the way in which the story is told. It all involves you getting up and moving around the room, finding holes in the wall to look through, as a way of exploring memory gaps. At that, Tomori excels, as we always know what we’re supposed to be doing at all times, with the cracks in the wall becoming more inventive and captivating each time. I personally found the message a little confusing, perhaps because the trauma we’re meant to uncover is so specific that you might only fully understand it if you’ve lived it. Even then, its clever use of space still makes it a memorable experience that’s worth the watch.
Yesterday Maybe
Venice Immersive: Competition
Creator: Matthieu Van Eeckhout
Runtime: 16’
Type of experience: Virtual Reality
“Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure,” reads the first sentence of Camus’s “The Stranger,” which Yesterday Maybe is inspired by. This is a personal project for Matthieu Van Eeckhout, who explores the moments that follow the announcement of a loved one’s death as if they were a dream of sorts, in which time is suspended and reality is distorted.
While Yesterday Maybe is a conceptually fascinating and visually interesting project, I wasn’t really able to connect with it. It felt to me as if it was more of a way for Van Eeckhout to process his own grief than a fully realized VR work designed to communicate something to those who experience it. Still, I’ve heard positive feedback from other festivalgoers, which is probably a sign of this being a subjective experience that will only resonate with some audiences.
Venice Immersive 2026, the Venice Film Festival’s XR strand, took place at Lido di Venezia’s Lazzaretto Island on September 1-12, 2026. Read our Venice Film Festival reviews!