With a total of forty-three projects, Venice Immersive is the Extended Reality section of the 80th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia. Here are some of the projects to check.

The 80th Venice International Film Festival of La Biennale di Venezia is back and with it the Venice Immersive section, which is entirely devoted to immersive media and includes all XR means of creative expression: 360° videos and XR works of any length, including installations and virtual worlds.

With Venice Immersive, the Venice International Film Festival continues, for the third year, to celebrate the virtual world building community. The Venice Immersive official selection features the Worlds Gallery, a collection of 24 virtual worlds, which is experienced as part of guided tours called ‘world hops’. The Venice Immersive section of the 80th Venice International Film Festival takes place on the Venice Immersive Island (Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio), located in front of Riva di Corinto in Lido di Venezia.

The 2023 Venice Immersive selection is composed of a total of forty-three projects (five 360° videos, twenty-one standalone VR projects, fifteen installations, two VR worlds on VRChat) from twenty-five Countries, divided as follows:

• 28 projects in Competition
• 9 projects in the Best of Immersive section
• 6 projects in the Biennale College Cinema VR section

Picking the most interesting titles on these platforms is always difficult – without watching them -, so here is a selection from the productions presented at Venice Immersive, based on my interests and experience with VR/AR and 360 videos. The chosen titles, in the different categories, should give those interested a notion of how the landscape looks like as far as XR experiences go.

Some titles are here for obvious reasons, like Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: The Seven Ravens, which, from the information available, appears to be a solid experience for the whole family, something that VR/AR is very much in need of. Others, like Floating With Spirits, point to narrative experiences that seem to fil like a glove for cinematic VR and to translate cultural traditions into new media platforms. In the end it is for you to decide which titles you would like to add to your library, or which titles would interest you enough to make the investment in the hardware to experience them.

Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: The Seven Ravens

Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: The Seven Ravens is an augmented reality pop-up book that draws from advancements in AR to transport you to the heart of a timeless tale narrated by award-winning author Neil Gaiman. A blend of timeless storytelling and immersive technology—a physical book serving as a familiar and tactile gateway into a magical world, the title, developed by Felix & Paul Studios unveils, according to the studio,  a significant advance in Augmented Reality storytelling.

The concept of mixing a traditional pop-up book with AR is , no doubt, exciting. Felix & Paul Studios, which is now celebrating its 10th anniversary, says this AR storybook “is inspired by our mission: to elevate immersive narrative experiences to realms previously uncharted. It’s with this spirit that we envision the future of storytelling, where the frontiers between the physical and digital world are seamlessly intertwined, and audiences are not merely observers but participants.”

The magic of the fairy tale classic is reimagined through cutting-edge technology, creating a spellbinding experience that transcends traditional storytelling. Captivating visuals and interactive elements merge to bring the story to life. Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: The Seven Ravens is narrated by Neil Gaiman, an author that has his name associated with a previous VR title that is among the best examples of what VR technology can offer to share narratives: Lucy and The Wolves in the Walls.

Gargoyle Doyle

Director Ethan Shaftel – from Ajax All Powerful –  is back with Gargoyle Doyle (in the Competition), a title about Doyle, a grouchy, self-important gargoyle with a major chip on his shoulder—quite literally, as he was damaged in a fall during installation above the cathedral’s main entrance. Gargoyle Doyle is a comedy of two ill-matched characters trapped together for hundreds of years that is the perfect canvas on which to explore some universals of human existence: our limited time on earth, and how we create reality with those around us.

Space itself becomes an expression of the psychology of the characters while between the laughs we explore the nature of consciousness, says Ethan Shaftel, adding that “the formal aspects of spatial media blur the edges of reality in ways that no previous format—cinema included—ever could: the visitor exists in a real room, populated by imagined creatures expressing desires and regrets. In the era of devices that blend actual and virtual spaces so convincingly we must ask ourselves: what is real, and who has the right to exist?”

Floating with Spirits

While you also have, in the competition section, titles as Wallace & Gromit in “The Grand Getaway” an interactive, narrative-led VR experience, apparently limited to the Meta Quest, I picked Floating with Spirits,  a cinematic VR in which magical stories are told by two young Mazatec, indigenous sisters Jocelynne and Jaquelyne, who recall the ancestral knowledge and mystical cosmogony that their shaman grandmother used to share with them, in the misty mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Who says what is real and what is not? How are we able to see and feel the invisible worlds? How can we communicate with the forces and spirits that live within our lands? While preparing for the Day of the Dead, Jocelynne and Jaquelyne share the stories of their ancestors. Director Juanita Onzaga says she spent years getting to know the sabedoras (knowledge people) from Mazatec indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico, listening, learning and sharing about their cosmogony and world vision. Inspired by their cosmogony, she and the team behind the title built this sensorial and poetic ancestral futurism VR experience, to shake our perception of the real, to rewire the ways we connect with nature and the afterlife.

Over the Rainbow

Director Craig Quintero started staging a series of ten large-scale, immersive performances for one audience member at a time in hotels, alleys, galleries, and museums across Taiwan, providing intimate moments of communion between the audience and performer, and that led to All That Remains, which premiered in Venice in 2022. Over the Rainbow is the director’s second experiment with translating this live experience into the virtual world. This is one of the titles  in the Best of immersive  series, and is not part of the competition.

It is human nature to long for something different, something that lies “somewhere over the rainbow”. At times, this aspirational dreaming leads to improvements, but more often than not, this attitude leads to a sense of discontent with our own lot, an unquenchable thirst for what is just beyond our reach. Over the Rainbow explores this precarious balance between desire and happiness, fantasy and the familiar. The project is structured  in a manner in which the viewer is engaged in the experience; they are simultaneously seeing and being seen. Quintero believes that “even though the audience and performers are thousands of miles apart, we are all in this together.”

Gaudi, l’Atelier du Divin

One of the exciting things about VR is that it can take you not just through space but through time, and while many think of time travel as going into the distant past,  Gaudi, l’Atelier du Divin, another title in the Best of Immersive series,  takes another direction and makes us travel to 1926, when, weakened by age and feeling death coming, Gaudí invites his new assistants to visit his atelier to understand his vision and complete his work…

By slipping into the costume of an assistant and guided by the voice of Gaudí himself, the user is plunged into the architect’s thoughts and discovers his extraordinary personality, his revolutionary working methods and his unique artistic universe. The experience has a goal: to discover Gaudí’s brilliant universe through a reconstruction of his workshop, which has now disappeared.

Directors Stéphane Landowski and Gaël Cabouat say that “more than a place of work, the studio, made in his image and moulded to his obsessions, had thus gradually become an extension of the artist and, even more, a materialization of his psyche. From the outset of the project, it was clear that we wanted to use the studio’s rendition to tell the story of the man, and to ensure that each wall, each ceiling, as delirious as his thoughts, would tell the story of his dreamlike and tortured universe, like a deforming and dynamic mirror.”

First Day

One of the six titles in the Biennale College Cinema VR, First Day shows how the first day (24 February 2022) of the unexpected Russian attack on Ukraine affected the Ukrainian people. A good example of the potential of VR for documentary work, First Day is a single-user, interactive, immersive project that places users directly in the immediate wartime situation, allowing them to experience firsthand the impacts of terror and disorientation as the war erupted. But not only. It challenges users to learn how to control themselves and make split-second decisions that can help save lives.

Director Valeriy Korshunov says “we were lucky enough to be selected and supported by the Biennale College Cinema VR. These workshops and the team of the College offered us a space to explore our creativity through our lives and stories. And this is my favourite piece of work so far. First Day is part of a much larger artistic VR project, the Virtual Museum of War” and added “VR allows us to walk through historical events in someone else’s shoes, thus evoking greater empathy. I believe First Day can potentially change our idea of what it means to be human in society. And we want to tell everyone under such circumstances and traumas: we hear and see you. You are not alone.”