Venice Immersive 2022 featured 30 immersive stories in competition with some of the fiercest competition yet. I’m joined by Pola Weiß to break down, analyze, & critique each one of the 30 experiences in competition starting with the three winners: Special Jury Prize [3rd place] Eggscape, Grand Jury Prize [2nd place] From the Main Square, and Best Immersive Experience [1st place] The Man Who Couldn’t Leave.
We then make our way through the 27 other experiences organized by which quality of presence it emphasized the most, whether it’s active presence focusing on interactivity & agency, emotional presence focusing on passive storytelling, embodied & environmental presence focusing on cultivating embodied experiences, or focusing on environmental storytelling, or spatial design, and then finally mental & social presence experiences focusing on puzzles, escape rooms, social dynamics, and text-based projects that play with expectations or imagination.
We spend on average around 5 minutes talking about each of the 30 immersive stories in competition (sometimes more and sometimes less), and you can find the timecodes down below to jump around.
I recorded over 20 interviews at Venice Immersive, and so stay tuned for deeper dives into over half of the pieces in competition, but this podcast should give a pretty comprehensive overview of this year’s selection. I don’t envy the jury who had to make some really tough choices for the top three, but hopefully this conversation can help highlight the entirety of the selection with a lot of innovations and refining on the crafts of immersive storytelling.
Here’s my Twitter thread with some real-time reactions:
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
