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#1650: Sneak Peak of Venice Immersive 2025 Selection with Curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac

August 17, 2025by kentbye

I spoke with Venice Immersive curators Liz Rosenthal & Michel Reilhac about sneak peak of their 2025 selection, which is their largest selection yet. See more context in the rough transcript below.

Here’s an Venice Immersive Program Cheat Sheet by Voices of VR podcast (PDF), which has an overview of the four categories of immersive experiences ordered by longest booking times to shortest (amount of time required for scheduling purposes) as well as the actual runtime, the number of people who can see it per slot, and then the number of people who can see it per day. This should hopefully help for your scheduling process.

I typically book experiences to roughly corresponding to hours. The Biennale scheduling website will open up on Thursday, August 21st, and it will not let you double book yourself. So I personally find it easier to book the longer experiences first, and then fill out my schedule with shorter experiences, and then experiences that generally have higher capacity. Note that Ancestors (capacity of 48 people), and L’Ombre (capacity of 50 people), and each of the VRChat sessions only have one booking time per day, and so these are also worth prioritizing if you want to see them and they should have lots of capacity throughout the week. The One the Other Earth may be one of the more logistically difficult experiences to see as you’ll need to make a trek up to the main Venice island. I’d recommend trying to keep your schedule clear for at least an hour before and afterwards.

Here’s a Venice Immersive Schedule Helper that I put together to help navigate the schedule.

Here’s a placeholder for my other coverage of Venice Immersive 2025 to be updated after the festival.

Venice Airport to Lido Island

  • The best way to get to Lido from the Venice airport is either via the Red or Blue Line of the Alilaguna Public Transport water taxi, which you can get tickets either after you come out of customs or you can go to the water taxi dock at the Venice airport, and there’s a booth there. 

Picking up badge at Palazzo del Casinò

Venezia 2000 to the VR Island (Lazzaretto Vecchio)

  • The best way to get to the VR Island of Lazzaretto Vecchio from the docks is the bus. The buses leave every 15-20 minutes, and it’s a 3 minute ride, and another 5 minute walk to the island. Here is a link to the bus route and the addresses. I believe it is either the A, N, or C or CE routes. I believe the bus stop names are S.Maria Elisabetta and then I get off at the Gallo Sant’Antonio stop.
  • The address of the VR island is Isola del Lazzaretto Vecchio, Lazzaretto Vecchio, 30100 Venezia VE, Italy
    • There is a water taxi that you can find the pick-up spot by looking at the google map and get directions there. It takes 1 minute of a ride, but there is only one taxi that can be a 10-15 minute wait depending on how busy it is.

Also be sure to check out XR Must’s interview with Liz and Michel, which I found a lot of helpful info in.

Some of the artist statement videos are starting to get posted onto the BiennaleChannel YouTube page.

Here’s a list Best of Experiences and Best of Worlds from VRChat that are already available if you’d like to get a head start on this year’s program.

Already Released – BEST OF EXPERIENCES

Already Released – BEST OF WORLDS – VRChat links included

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.438] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, we're going to be diving into a bit of a sneak peek of Venice Immersive 2025 with the curators of Liz Rosenthal and Michelle Reak. So Venice Immersive is the most robust and best immersive storytelling festival that happens all year. You see a ton of different new world premieres. It's on an island off of Lido in Venice that ends up having like the entire XR and immersive industry converge in there for like 10 days to not only see all the latest work that's there, but also like funding of new projects. And it's just a great networking opportunity, but also just a place to see all the best work that is coming out over the course of the year. i'm going to be on site watching all the different experiences doing lots of interviews again and i had a chance to sit down with liz and michelle to talk around all the different pieces and the competition we actually went through all the pieces within the best of selection and then a bit of a sneak peek of some of the different college biennale and vr chat worlds gallery 69 projects and all totaling around like 30 hours worth of content Some of the content is available for you to see. There's VRChat Worlds Gallery that will have a public world that allows you to go and check out all these different worlds. Although in the description, I'll try to add some links if you want to get an early look of some of these different worlds. Not all of them are released yet, but by the festival, a lot of them will be publicly available. Also, the Best of Worlds, there's a number of different experiences that you can also check out, so I'll have some links to those as well. And then I'll be onsite looking and watching all the different pieces of the competition, talking to as many of the creators as I can. Last year, I ended up doing around 30 hours of coverage from Venice Immersive and hope to do somewhere around the same this year as I check out all the different pieces and talk to all different artists. I will also try to include some helper content within the context of the show notes. I'm hoping to include some images that provide some additional context information to help you navigate this scheduling process. Still waiting to get some final clearance on some of the different information. So it may or may not be available before I go offline in a couple of days. just kind of waiting for that to come through. But I wanted to just call out a couple of scheduling things that are helpful to know. Overall, there is more capacity this year to see different pieces than any other year, but the pieces are longer. And so there's also more possibilities for you to still not see everything that you want to see, because there's just way more experiences than you might have time to see. Or there may be some very scarce experiences that only 11 people can see a day, and you may not make the cut as you go through all the different scheduling. And so Listen to this interview and listen to all the different projects that are there. There should be some videos on YouTube that give you a little bit more context for each of the projects. You can read the synopses. But also there's a bit of a scheduling strategy that I usually use, which is looking at what the runtime is and then the booking slot length. There's some onboarding time that isn't always disclosed yet. Hopefully, they'll be able to make more of this information available in the future, but things that I'm looking for are what's the runtime, what's the booking time, how many people can see it per session, and so I hope to include some information that is how many sessions are available per each of these different slots, and then what's the total capacity per day, just to give you a sense of how difficult it may be to see some of these different pieces. And then as you are going through your scheduling process, I usually try to book my longer experiences first, just because the scheduling process within Venice is once you book something, then you can't double book yourself. And so if you book a 15 minute experience and you want to see like an hour experience, then you should see which one you want to see more. If you want to see the 15 minute one, then since there are more slots within the 15 minutes, then you might want to preference the hour long slot before you do the 15 minute slot. So Things like that. Hopefully some of this information that I'm putting out will hopefully help you navigate that. I did want to highlight four peculiar things around this year's schedule. So there's a couple of experiences that are only having like one screening a day. However, that one screening has like four ancestors. As an example, there's 48 people that can see it with the one slot every day that's happening from 1215 to 130. And then L'Ombre is showing one time a day with 50 people. And the only time that's showing is from like 6.30 to 7.45. There's also one experience that you have to make an excursion up into Venice. And from what I hear from both Liz and Michelle, they think it's an absolutely amazing experience. It's a part of the best of selection. It's called On the Other Earth. And I would recommend like saving like an hour slot beforehand, maybe even a little bit more, maybe like 90 minutes to get there just because Getting around in Venice can be like if you're trying to get there on a specific time, then it can be a little stressful. So giving yourself a little slack for what ends up being like maybe 45 minute trip. But just to give you enough leeway, because there's different boat times that you may or may not list, you have to make a number of different transfers to get there. So anyway, making your trip up to Venice, leaving an hour before and afterwards just to be able to get back because it's going to be hard. You can also alternatively take a water taxi to get there super quick. But those screenings for On the Other Earth are happening at like 12, 1400, 1600 and 1800 each and every day. And so there's like a capacity of like 18 people or so for each of those. But again, you'll have to kind of like block out some time. in your schedule, if you do want to actually make that excursion up to see that. And so just trying to figure out where you want to see that. So you don't double book yourself since I don't actually think the travel time is going to be accounted for when you're booking experiences this year. And also the VR chat worlds gallery will have 11 different slots that are happening over the course of the day for each of the different programs. There's only one a day. Some of the different experiences are available that you can see on your own, but it is also fun if you have some extra time and capacity to do it as a part of a collaborative experience with other people within the context of Venice. And you also have like guided tours, which is a lot of fun to very quickly see a lot of different things, a swift tour to see some of the best of immersive world building that's happening within the context of VRChat. Again, hopefully I'll be able to make some of these different resources available in the show notes so you can dive into more details as you start to schedule. But I just wanted to call out those three things that I noticed as I was trying to put together my schedule of things that you may want to try to make time for to go check out if you want to go see them. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Liz and Michelle happened on Friday, July 18th, 2025, and is a part of my broader Venice Immersive 2025 coverage. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:06:48.042] Liz Rosenthal: I'm Liz Rosenthal. I'm the co-curator of Venice Immersive and the Venice Immersive Market at the Venice International Film Festival. I'm also an executive producer of immersive projects.

[00:07:01.536] Michel Reilhac: And I'm Michel Reyac. I'm co-curator of Venice Immersive with Liz, and I'm also an independent maker of immersive experiences.

[00:07:12.886] Kent Bye: Great. Well, let's dive right into this year's selection of Venice Immersive. Maybe you could just give like a top level overview of what we can expect this year in the program.

[00:07:21.914] Liz Rosenthal: Sure. Well, it's our largest edition ever. We have 69 projects in selection in the various sections which we can run through. So there are 30 in our competition section, 11 in our best of out of competition experiences section, 23 in our best of worlds out of competition section and five in our Biennale college section.

[00:07:49.036] Michel Reilhac: It's probably the most exciting edition so far because we are noticing new trends. I would say two trends. One is that there's definitely the birth of a commercial market that is happening in immersive with LBE, location-based entertainment installations that are able to welcome large numbers of simultaneous users. the immersive experience is no longer a one only isolated experience, but the most exciting work is done in either social platforms or with technologies that allow up to several hundreds actually of simultaneous users to be together at the same time experiencing the same story world. And that's something we're seeing, that's something that also requires a lot of space. We've been confronted with a real challenge this year to accommodate a lot of installations that require very large spaces, which for a festival on a limited territory is quite a challenge. I would say the second one is the extension, I would say, of the field of narrative in a cinematographic way into immersive. We're seeing more film directors, traditional film directors, trying their first experiences in VR, and some of them with very, very big names from Hollywood. And this is something overall that we're seeing. We are in a phase where telling stories through immersive is finding its new ways.

[00:09:34.656] Liz Rosenthal: So it's interesting seeing this move to narrative storytelling that doesn't involve, well, some of it obviously involves interactive storytelling, but there's been a big push to really concentrate on cinematic narratives. So our big pieces from Doug Liman, which are launching the new headset. Well, it's the first time that an immersive film is shown on the headset to anyone. And also showing projects like Submerge, which launched on Apple at the end of last year. And we have other projects as well in the selection, which really push the boundaries of being in a spatial environment and telling a narrative story that makes you feel that you're stepping into a film.

[00:10:19.192] Kent Bye: Yeah, so Asteroid by Doug Liman, I saw that it's going to be on the Project Wuhan, but also using like some AI interactions with Google Gemini. I thought it was interesting to kind of see how that is starting to all come together. And then Edward Berger for Submerged. And so when it comes to the other big installations, I noticed in your interview with XR Must that you were talking around how there's a piece off island just to have a little bit more space. Maybe you could talk about some of those projects that are going to be off the island.

[00:10:48.470] Michel Reilhac: One of them is a first because it's going to be a collaboration between Venice Immersive and the Dance Biennale, headed by a major choreographer. Wayne McGregor is opening the Dance Biennale with a very, very technological piece with a 360 degree. circular screen, five meters high, 18K definition, with performers stepping out of the screen, from the screen, through ad hoc XR headsets that the audience will be wearing. And that installation will remain in the Arsenale, which is one of the places where both the Architecture Biennale and the Art Biennale take place. in Venice proper. So this will be the one installation that will be outside of the island for the first time in collaboration with the Dance Biennale. Everything else will take place on the island, including very large-scale installations like L'Ombre, The Shadow by Blanca Lee, that involves 10 performers and scaffolding and a very large-scale installation. installation that premiered in Paris a month ago for 200 simultaneous viewers. We will adapt the version for 50 simultaneous viewers in Venice on the VR island.

[00:12:07.702] Liz Rosenthal: And for that, we've had to use a new space on the island that actually belongs to the Polo Museum, because half the island is run by the Biennale for Venice Immersive. And there's another museum group that looks after the other half that's renovating that part of the island. So we're extending into a new part. of Lazaretto Vecchie so it's quite exciting and as Michelle mentioned we have several large scale installations for example Blur which is Craig Contere's next piece that he's co-directed with Phoebe Greenberg of the FI Centre and that's going to be in our largest room that we were using before that we used as a conference room before so we've also had to you know redesign the exhibition so we're using a lot of new spaces and the Venice Immersive Market is relocating in different parts of the island. And we've decided because space is at such a premium this year, it's been quite a jigsaw puzzle, putting everything together. We have a new approach to the exhibition where we're going to blend the different sections together. So you won't find the in competition section in one part of the island or the best of out of competition section projects or the college projects are going to be blended together. So the exhibition's going to be quite well designed in terms of space because it was really important that projects flow together.

[00:13:29.814] Michel Reilhac: And the market itself will be blended into the fabric of the exhibition, right?

[00:13:38.038] Kent Bye: Nice. Okay, so maybe let's continue to go through the competition, either thematically or by, you know, however you want to cluster it, even by associative link or, yeah, just kind of start to walk through some of the other projects that are in competition.

[00:13:51.662] Michel Reilhac: I think we started with large-scale installations. I mean, we're very happy to welcome back Craig Quintero, like as Liz mentioned with Blur, but we're also welcoming back Singly, who is coming back. She was one of our grand prize winners. two years ago, and she is back with a very, very impressive, highly sophisticated installation called The Clouds Are 2,000 Meters High. And it's a very large-scale installation where you will be free-roaming within it. The level of sophistication of the visuals and of the story is quite unprecedented. We're very happy to premiere this work.

[00:14:33.584] Liz Rosenthal: And she's using Gaussian splats in a way that we have not seen yet. It's so sophisticated. You have the impression that it's totally live captured and they've scanned the environments in the most amazing way. And it's a very, very long piece as well. But the level of the visual quality is extraordinary. It's a very moving narrative story. And that's one of the projects I feel is... you feel that you're really stepping into a cinematic piece, but in a spatial environment. So it's a story of a man who loses his wife in a bus explosion, and he discovers an unfinished novel that's about the almost extinct snow leopard, and an indigenous origin myth story of indigenous tribes in Taiwan. And he moves from the city up into the cloud forest. And it's a really fantastical, surreal, moving story. So that's a key highlight.

[00:15:30.373] Michel Reilhac: But to illustrate what we were saying about the trend of telling stories the way Hollywood or cinema does, there's also a French piece called The Sad Story of the Little Mouse Who Wanted to Become Somebody. And it's really a story that illustrates the struggle of the little mouse against Santa Claus, where she wants to truly have a place with her creative friends. designs of toys. And it's a story that really tries, it's French in collaboration with Germany and Belgium, but it really tries to tell a story for everyone. And this is something that we were saying, you know, witnessing this desire to appeal to larger audiences and to transcend the technological hurdle of having to wear a headset by offering experiences that can speak to larger audiences.

[00:16:28.963] Liz Rosenthal: And I know loads of people are going to ask us, what have you selected in terms of projects that are using AI? And Michelle and I saw many projects that were using voice interaction that felt really sort of software driven as opposed to storytelling driven. But the projects we've chosen that have a really sophisticated and subtle use of AI was something that we really focused on where it was kind of seamless So, for example, Asteroid, obviously you mentioned at the beginning, they're using the Gemini AI feature in conjunction with the headset. And it's going to be interesting because it's something that Gemini operates without a supposed lag with the voice interaction. You'll be interacting with... One of the characters in the film that's played by DK Metcalf, who's a famous NFL player, and it's a story of astronauts and a celebrity that's sent up into space to land on this asteroid that's made of precious metal, and they all fight, and only one person, a female astronaut, comes back to Earth, but in fact, he has survived, DK Metcalf. And you're helping guide him back to find out where he is on the planet. So that's a sort of interesting incorporation into a very cinematic story. that is kind of wrapped around the app that's 180-degree storytelling, but you'll be interacting with him after you've seen that part of the story. And then we have a project from Switzerland by Melody Mousseux called Empathy Creatures. And for Michelle and I, it was one of the most subtle uses of AI we've seen, where it's very simple. You're feeding a bird. And it was one of the most seamless uses and characters design we've seen with AI where you're feeding and looking after a bird and you're really engaged with getting it to come towards you and feeding it berries and you start talking to it and you completely lose sense of the fact that you're interacting with it. It feels really, really natural.

[00:18:24.915] Michel Reilhac: And the emotional connection you feel with this bird entirely generated by an AI is quite remarkable, quite simple, but incredibly subtle and almost organic, I was going to say. One of the things that we are also very interested in, Liz and myself, we're always looking for for work that provide an immersive experience, but not necessarily through a headset channeled technology. And for this, like every other year, we try and invite a few installations that explore immersiveness through different means. One of these projects is called Heartbeat. It's a French project by a young couple. They're very newcomers to the immersive field. And in this installation, you're basically facing someone, another member of the audience that you do not necessarily know and you're sitting in a dark space with a wristband that measures your heartbeat and the heartbeat is materialized by a projection on a screen behind the person that you're facing and the whole experience that lasts no more than maybe 10 12 minutes is about seeing whether you can harmonize your heartbeats and you can make them beat at the same pace. That's all it is. And there's a voiceover that you listen to and that you sort of obey. It's a sort of a meditation exercise. It's an incredibly poetic way of offering a completely new way of relating to one another. It's very beautiful and emotional as well. There's another one. Maybe Liz, you want to talk about it? Ancestors?

[00:20:11.041] Liz Rosenthal: Yes, that was by Staya Halema, a Dutch director. And it's a really beautiful story where you, it's using smartphones and up to 40 people. And you basically make a baby together with someone else and you're paired with people and then in groups of people whose future generations you're making that you see visually. And it creates the most incredible connection with you. And the way that Staya has designed the experience really gives you a chance to, connect and discuss in a really natural way about things that are kind of personal. I know when I tried it, Michelle and I tried it together back at IDFA last November, I ended up having a conversation about my grandmother with someone I didn't know that was really deeply moving. And it's a really sensitive piece and we don't often see that design of a story where you meet people you haven't met but you are you know you really feel compelled to share by the way that he's designed it and there's another piece as well that's set in our best of section that is by Sister Sylvester who showed a project called Shadow Time back in 2023 called Constantinopoliad which we saw in CPH docs which is probably one of our most I would say low-tech projects It's a reading experience, and it's absolutely stunning, where you're given this very beautiful book that's like a kind of sculpture almost, where you discover together. There's a narration that you hear through headphones, and also you're reading a book and pulling apart these different compartments and pages. It's almost like a deeply sophisticated pop-up book, where you're discovering the story of Cavafy, who is a famous Greek poet, And his life and his secret story of his queerness back at the end of the 19th century. So that's another piece. And it uses lighting design and projections. And it's up for eight people who are reading four different books together.

[00:22:11.994] Michel Reilhac: There's another section, if you will, of what we're every year very interested in representing, Liz and I, is games. And we have a few in this year's selection that we're very excited about. Two of them, Ghost Town and The Midnight Walk, are, I would say, traditional games in the sense that they're, of course, they're immersive with a headset. And they're incredibly creative visually and narratively. They've both been released. So they're in our best of section. They're each in a very, very different style. Ghost Town is a thriller taking place on an island lost in the Scotland Sea. And Midnight Walk is an incredibly creative, totally handmade, designed, surreal adventure. There's another one that we have selected and we're very, very pleased about, very excited about, called Wall Town Wonders. In this game, you're basically facing walls and you're helping tiny people build a village. inside the wall. So they're popping up outside the wall and they need to build storage, a restaurant, cafe, houses, and you're just basically helping them. And the more you play the game, the more your wall becomes animated with all these people living inside the wall. It's a wonderful, wonderful game. We expect that a lot of people will want to play more than the time that we give for the sessions we're going to open this. And then we also have the latest game by Innerspace, the French studio. It's called One True Path, and it's an incredibly sophisticated, probably the most complex game that we are offering to play this year.

[00:24:00.345] Liz Rosenthal: I'll say another trend that we have recently If you want me to move on to something else is there's really a wide range of projects that have a kind of handmade painterly or handcrafted feel, which I find beautiful because we live in an increasingly synthetic and virtual world. So it's super interesting seeing sort of painting and a stop motion look in these projects. So Michelle was mentioning the Midnight Walk. All of the characters are being crafted in clay originally. So it has this beautiful stop motion quality in a very sophisticated game. But another project I wanted to highlight was Creation of the Worlds, a project from Lithuania, which is one of the most beautiful methods of experiences it lasts about 35 minutes and it's created by the team who made Trail of Angels which we showed I think it was back in 2018 and it's going back to look at the world of Curialis I think that he's the name of the Lithuanian painter where they're totally inspired and bringing his images into this amazing journey that you take through the sort of cosmic and the macro and down into nature, into this urban environment and back again. And you go on this kind of very beautiful painterly feeling of a journey. It's like a kind of fantastical cyclical fairy tale with no dialogue or voiceover. Another project I put in that category is A Long Goodbye. which is a project from Belgium, which has a very sort of hand-painted, hand-drawn feel to it, that I'll put in a similar category to Emperor, which won an award two years ago. And it's a story of Ida, who's a 72-year-old pianist, and her husband is trying to get her to sort of like prompt memories of their time together because she's suffering from dementia. And it has this beautiful handmade feel to it. And it's very, very beautiful and sort of seamless in terms of interaction again with hand tracking and gaze control.

[00:26:08.829] Michel Reilhac: Another thing, is it okay, Ken, that we continue just jumping from... Yeah, that's fine.

[00:26:14.351] Kent Bye: I'm keeping it running total and I'll bring it up once you come to a stop and then I'll hit the rest, but go ahead.

[00:26:21.094] Michel Reilhac: We'll just continue just for a little bit on things that we feel excited about. One of the things that we always look for also with Liz is contemporary works that do break... codes and norms. And it's something that is very difficult to find because there's a form of moral rule that because of the platforms, because of reaching out to very wide audiences, it's very difficult to find work that is provocative or that reaches beyond the boundaries of a moral code, you know, that seems to be the rule for a lot of the content that we're seeing. And we're very happy to present Dark Rooms, which is a Danish installation by Mads Damsbo. And it's about sexual deviance, if you want, or sexual alternatives.

[00:27:13.773] Liz Rosenthal: Nonconformity, yeah.

[00:27:15.534] Michel Reilhac: Excuse me?

[00:27:16.634] Liz Rosenthal: Or nonconformity, I guess.

[00:27:18.455] Michel Reilhac: Exactly. Nonconforming sexual behaviours. And the beautiful thing about this piece is that it's very direct, it's very sexual, and yet not voyeuristic at all. And it's not a piece that you watch feeling uncomfortable and being invited to witness things that you might not be interested in. It remains incredibly human. It's about... offering the opportunity to understand other ways of life, other choices in how to deal with intimacy and with sexual behaviors. It's a remarkable installation. We will be showing three portraits within this piece. In the end, in the very final version, there will be four, and we're showing three portraits of persons that are living an alternative sexual lifestyle.

[00:28:13.047] Liz Rosenthal: So it is a documentary. These are real stories. And it's quite remarkable how inventive it is as a documentary. And the visuals, again, are incredible. The spatial environments are really imaginative, how they've blended this documentary story, real stories, into this intimate but also provocative piece.

[00:28:35.953] Michel Reilhac: Kent, maybe we should stop here and let you tell us what you want us to talk about.

[00:28:41.734] Kent Bye: I know there's a couple of pieces from South by Southwest that I had a chance to see as well. Reflections of a Little Red Dot, which I think is starting to use archives of material as well as Tender Claws with face jumping. That's a project I could see over and over again, just because so innovative in terms of using eye tracking to tell this dream logic story. But yeah, I don't know if you have any other comments on those two pieces that were out of South by Southwest this year.

[00:29:05.703] Liz Rosenthal: Yeah, for Reflections of Little Red Dot, which won the Grand Jury Prize in South by, we can show it in our competition section because it's a US project. So it's the international premiere in Venice. So it's another very inventive form of documentary that I hadn't seen before, where she's blending in real life objects like a projector, a physical projector, where you go into the room, you put in a real slide and it activates in the headset. screen, you turn around and see a screen on the other side of the room and there's a table that you move around and it triggers different stories about Singapore. So Little Red Dot is the alternative name for Singapore. And she's actually used filming and stories and she was going to make a documentary, so it's There are flat screen images within this spatial environment that she shot back, I think it was in 2015 or 2016, of the changing nature of Singapore. So it's blending all these different elements together in a really clever way where you feel very natural moving around the space. engaging with this projector, this real projector, and it sort of changes the chapter. So I hadn't seen that before using mixed reality. So it's a really lovely use of mixed reality. You know, Michelle mentioned Walled Town Wonders, another project that we think is really inventive. So yes, I'm face jumping from Tender Claws. This is the first time we've got a Tender Claws project in Venice. It's really nice to have something that's really comic and kind of surreal and comic and fun. So it's using the mechanism of gaze where you're in a very new way, where you're actually sort of jumping from different perspectives by looking at characters in the eye, you become them. So you navigate through the different scenes by gazing into the eyes of different characters and seeing from their perspective.

[00:31:00.063] Michel Reilhac: We also have two pieces that premiered in Cannes. One is the exploding girl, which is a very provocative, very violent and cheesy experience in low poly. And it's quite controversial. The other one is an installation that we loved in Cannes and it's in our best of section called Lily. Maybe you heard about it. It's an amazing installation, live installation where you're basically drawn to embody a hacker surveying a woman who is the wife of a high rank officer in the Iranian army and government and who is actually rebelling against the system. And you are trying to help her. And it's a take on Macbeth. It's a collaboration with Royal Shakespeare Company. And it's a very, very impressive setup that doesn't use headsets. And you're on computers, you know, following instructions to try and help this woman go through her surveillance nightmare. Hmm.

[00:32:14.443] Kent Bye: And so if we start to go through some of the other competition pieces, I have a cheat sheet that I'm ordering it by length just because sometimes the longer pieces are a little bit harder to see just because there's less opportunities oftentimes. And so let's start with Mulan 2125 out of China.

[00:32:31.775] Liz Rosenthal: Yeah, so this is another project where you can put it in a kind of cinematic storytelling category. It's a super impressive sci-fi story with female lead characters. It's totally CGI and it's being shown on Apple Vision Pro. And we haven't seen anything with this kind of refined detail that's been shown on this headset before. And it has really, really smooth and well-designed camera movement. So it's a genre story, but very, very impressive.

[00:32:58.252] Michel Reilhac: I just wanted to add that because we all know that so much is happening in the field of immersive arts and entertainment in China, we feel that it's very important that at Venice we do show some of what we see that is coming from China and that we think is really outstanding and represents what is going on in China today.

[00:33:23.826] Kent Bye: A couple other Apple Vision Pro pieces you mentioned submerged already, but there's also Adventure Ice Dive, as well as D-Day, the Camera Soldier, which are out and available for folks if they happen to have access to an Apple Vision Pro. I highly recommend checking out those. And I've had interviews with the producer of D-Day, as well as with Charlotte Nickelbergf on Ice Dive. But I don't know if there's any other Apple Vision Pro projects above and beyond that that are in the selection, including Milan 2025. Yeah.

[00:33:50.735] Liz Rosenthal: Those are it. So you've mentioned, yeah, the four projects, I think.

[00:33:54.997] Kent Bye: Okay.

[00:33:55.297] Liz Rosenthal: Yes.

[00:33:56.258] Kent Bye: Okay. So if we go over to the next on the list, The Great Orator by Daniel Ernst out of the Netherlands.

[00:34:02.481] Michel Reilhac: Yeah, it's a piece that we've been following for almost five years. It's an incredible endeavor. It's a one-man project. Daniel has been working on this story world by himself for about five years. And the world is... where you find yourself awakening in what seems to be a small, cozy, kitsch apartment. And there is a constant voiceover, a loudspeaker voice of a woman giving you advice as a guru would. And that woman is directly inspired from a guru woman from the Netherlands in the 70s. And she's basically trying to become your spiritual advisor over the loudspeaker. And as you understand you need to move out of this place, you realize that this apartment is actually just a very tiny cabin inside a massive, technological sort of warehouse where everything is under surveillance and where this voice of this woman is constantly coming out of the speakers everywhere. And as you reach out to the edges of this silo within which you find yourself enclosed and you look outside, you realize that you're standing in this sort of huge... I mean, it is a massive... industrial construction that sits in the middle of a never-ending parking lot, full of cars, but there's not a soul in sight. There's no one. All humans seem to have disappeared and you progressively enter this sort of nightmarish sensation that you are the only living person in a world where all other living beings have disappeared for reasons unknown. And it's a metaphor for, I guess, the world we live in, where we're constantly drowning in information and being sort of hypnotized by, you know, the voices of the media, where our humanity is progressively being taken away from us. It's an amazing piece, very powerful on an emotional level.

[00:36:15.363] Kent Bye: And we have If You See a Cat out of Japan.

[00:36:18.285] Liz Rosenthal: So If You See a Cat is a really beautiful story about about a boy who loses his cat and becomes really depressed and is sent to a psychiatric unit. And it's a really subtle piece where you go through the treatment with him and it shows the brutality of how people who are suffering from mental health issues and depression are treated. So it's a very gentle piece that... animation feel to it and there are quite a few pieces that talk about mental health in quite a subtle way so there's this one there's Mirage as well that comes from Saudi Arabia which we're Excited to Include by Naima Karim. It's her second VR piece. And it was really co-created with her daughter. And it's very much about, you know, mother's story of not understanding how her daughter was down and depressed and having to deal with it. And it's using a sort of like gesture, a hand gesture where you're reaching out towards the girl, but you can't touch her. and you can't connect with her. So that's another beautiful story. And in a way, the Exploding Girl that Michelle mentioned before is another project that really, it's a really powerful project because it really expresses a kind of nihilism or the lack of hope, I think, that especially younger people have in society that seems to be sort of falling apart and it seems incredibly brutal. So yeah, we have quite a few projects that are sort of in that category.

[00:37:57.100] Kent Bye: Mm-hmm. There's a co-production between five different countries of Taipei, Finland, Belgium, Portugal, and France, a piece called Sense of Nowhere.

[00:38:07.566] Michel Reilhac: Yeah, it originates from Taiwan, and it's a poetic exercise in transcending reality. It's really a poem. It doesn't really carry a story in the narrative sense, but it's a journey. It's an emotional journey through different aesthetics, and it's visually quite incredible. When Liz was referring to Creation of the Worlds, you know, as a project that explores the world of a painter, the realms of the imagination of this maker.

[00:38:42.669] Liz Rosenthal: And particularly it's based on Taoist principles of reality and they mention Jungian principles. So actually your drive forward the narrative and what you see through two gestures which are moving your palms in a different way. So you have a beautiful connection to the visuals and how they transform by doing these two Taoist prayer gestures. And it's totally surreal and takes you into crazy places. But also it's got a very handmade feel to it, which is very beautiful.

[00:39:16.333] Michel Reilhac: Hmm. In a very different way, La Magie Opéra is one of the few LBE projects that we've seen recently that feels... how could I say, sophisticated enough to not become too standardized. We fear that the LBE market produces, because it's targeting very large audiences and family audiences in particular, we fear that a lot of the content we see in LBE places tend to all look and feel the same a little bit. This one is about giving you a flavor of what the opera world is like and giving references through four major opus from the opera culture. And you end up helping an opera singer overcome her stage fright and her fear of not being good enough and escaping the performance of Tosca that she is supposed to do that night. So you're with her and you are revisiting the reasons why she believes in opera as an art form and why she wanted to become an opera singer. And little by little, by blending the history of opera and her personal history, you support her and help her. And then you're with her in the choir on stage at the Paris Opera House when finally she performs Tosca and you are with her on stage.

[00:40:54.634] Kent Bye: Hmm. Nice. Then we have a piece called Eddie and I out of Israel, Germany and France.

[00:41:01.305] Liz Rosenthal: Yes, this is a project directed by Maya Shackle that was in our market a couple of years ago. And it's teaching you sign language. And you are a giant bear and you're helping Eddie sign. You're helping him get confident enough to go on a camping trip with his school friends. And so it's a kind of animated style, but you were taught how to make about four different sign languages along the way. So it's told in a really lovely, playful, animated style. And it's quite an inventive use of hand tracking to learn these gestures. It's a very sort of child's story that you go through and a kind of child's fairy tale in a way. Where you go into the forest, he goes to sleep at night before he's meant to go on this camping trip. And you are a giant bear that he meets in the forest and you're signing and learning sign language with him.

[00:41:57.051] Michel Reilhac: The following one, Black Cats and Checkered Flags, is one of our three Italian projects this year. The second one is a little bit down called Alien Perspective. And the third one is the winner of our college program this year called Relaunching Luigi Brolio. The Black Cats and Checkered Flag is really about the story of a leading Formula One driver. His name was Alberto Ascari in the 50s and 60s. He was a major star in the field of car racing at the time. And this mixed reality experience brings you close to him, to his life. and also provides you with the mixed reality experience of actually being in the pit with the mechanics and helping the car be ready and changed, you know, for the race. So it's quite an ambitious project. It's done with the support of a few important sponsors in Italy, Ferrari being one. And it's one of the big... projects made in Italy this past few months. The second Italian one is Alien Perspective. And this is really about the work of Carlo Rambaldi, who was the creator, the visual creator behind E.T. He was working in Hollywood and was a master at creating science fiction, fantastical sets and characters and props. And he actually designed all these seminal science fiction environments that have been influencing the field, you know, since then. He died, and this piece is about sharing the other side of his work, which is his own artistic vision and his own work as a painter, painting incredible landscapes. And the installation allows you to travel and fly through those beautiful landscapes that he created. The third Italian project, relaunching Luigi Broglio, is the winner of this year's college. It's an Italian team based in Kenya. And they're telling the story of Luigi Broglio, who was a visionary in the 60s and who managed to set up the space station for Italy in the Indian Ocean, just off the coast of Kenya, and where Italy was able to be the third country after the US and Russia to place satellites in orbit. This is a bit of a forgotten story, but It's actually coming back into light now because Starlink, the company, the Elon Musk company, is now negotiating reusing the very same platform which sits in the waters of the Indian Ocean to be a launch pad for their satellite, for the Starlink satellites. And it's told in a very, very humoristic way. It's a very theatrical approach. performers from a theater company in Naples in the very tradition of popular theater from Naples.

[00:45:12.094] Kent Bye: Nice. And we have a co-production from France and USA called Collective Body. That's an installation and a VR piece.

[00:45:18.240] Liz Rosenthal: That's right. That's by a US choreographer based in France called Sarah Silverblatt-Buser. And she is creating a piece for multiple people. It was developed with the Lincoln Center. I think it's for up to 12 people. We're showing it for four people where you explore movement, you explore your own movement, and then you join with the group and explore your collective movement. So the way you move is represented by a particular style. As you start moving, the piece recognises the kind of movement you have to the music and it gives you a kind of elemental style of ice or lava or water that sort of represents the way that you move. And then you collectively move together and can sort of transform your avatar.

[00:46:07.421] Kent Bye: Nice. I'm looking forward to seeing what the Lincoln Center has been up to. I know they've been commissioning a number of different pieces and showing different things within the context of their location there in New York City. So excited to see this piece that's being featured here at Venice. Then we have The Great Escape that's out of Belgium and Luxembourg.

[00:46:23.393] Liz Rosenthal: So this is another lovely light comedy piece that's an animation about three geraniums and it's hand-drawn style animation. So you're one of the three geraniums. You're stuck in a pot on a windowsill looking out in a street, in a generic street in Belgium. and you're really bored. Well, one of your companion geraniums is moaning and is really bored and really wants to break out of the pot. And you're kind of sitting there watching all the things go around your owner who's watering you he's making coffee and it's really boring and then you get to escape so that's what the great escape is you get to escape out of the house and into the metro and it's the story of the escaping geraniums and what happens to them nice then we have the time before out of the uk well the time before is a beautiful and moving piece that's a blend between hand-drawn animation and very subtle live action. And it's a story of a little boy who's separated from his sister, their children. He's separated from his older sister, and it's his memory of being together with her and her protecting him and getting him to sort of imagine escape family that they're in that's torn by strife. And eventually the mother and father split up and they're separated. So it's a kind of memory of his childhood and being with his sister. He was very brutally separated with during his upbringing. So totally new director. I think he was at the Royal College of Arts. So it's really lovely to discover these first time directors as well, because, you know, we have a mixture of people that we know well, and it's wonderful seeing how their pieces have evolved. But we're also so happy when we meet these super new talented directors coming into the field.

[00:48:08.968] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm excited to see Rose Bond's latest piece. I really enjoyed the coming home and the mix of the dome and spatial audio. And it sounds like 1968 is going to be similar.

[00:48:19.921] Michel Reilhac: It is similar. She's using the exact same setup as the one she used last year for her piece that was part of the college last year. So this is the occasion for her to come back and premiere this piece in competition for us. The piece is more ambitious than last year in terms of visuals. It's really about protest movements and it's very timely in the sense that it is promoting something figures and movements that have protested oppression in their times. It's animation and the sound is perceived through a set of micro speakers all over the dome within which you are sitting with nine other people watching the visuals in the headset, but being immersed in the sound that is coming in a diegetic way all around you without headphones.

[00:49:15.086] Kent Bye: Nice. Yeah, very much looking forward to that piece. So then we have 8pm and the cat out of South Korea.

[00:49:21.367] Liz Rosenthal: That's a beautiful piece, very moving piece of the story of an illustrator who's sitting at his window at 8pm drawing, and he sees a cat in front of him. That's every day. He's waiting for his girlfriend Mina to come home at the same time as she doesn't come home. And she's killed in a crowd crush that actually happened in 2022 in Seoul. So it's this very moving piece of telling that story of him being by the window waiting for her to come home. It's a very illustrative style. It's using generative AI in a very subtle way where you input at the beginning what you see in the garden and then it transforms the visuals very subtly throughout the piece.

[00:50:04.076] Kent Bye: Nice. We're in the homestretch of the competition. We've got three more. We have Dance, Dance, Dance, Matisse out of France.

[00:50:09.960] Michel Reilhac: Yeah, this piece was made on the occasion of a major retrospective of the work by Matisse, the painter at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. And it shows in a very, very simple way using cut paper aesthetics that The project that Matisse was commissioned to do for a private foundation in the US, illustrating the theme of dance in the main hall of this mansion, and how the project became much more complex than it originally was designed to be. And it's actually a pretext to make us understand how Matisse worked and to get inside his mind in a way and understand the difficulties of making an artist's vision be matched by the realization, by the actual work that is produced. It's a very, very... efficient and elegant way of making us be under the skin of a major creator in a way that we haven't seen before.

[00:51:27.950] Kent Bye: Nice. We have The Big Cube. That's a co-production from Finland, Belgium, China and Portugal, which is an interesting mix of countries, actually.

[00:51:35.472] Liz Rosenthal: I think it's a program that the project Sense of Nowhere came out of because they got the same co-production countries. So I imagine it's some kind of program joining the EU with France. maybe those different countries. So the big cube is a really inventive quill project. So you're in a world made of cubes and the cubes are creatures also who are living there. and they're pushing around these cubes following instructions. So you feel like you're in a giant sort of like Amazon type factory made of cubes where everybody's just automated. And one of the creatures breaks through and of course everything changes and a world of color and fantasy starts happening. And obviously it's a metaphor for pushing the boundaries and not following very strict and oppressive rules.

[00:52:30.113] Kent Bye: The final piece in competition that we haven't talked about yet is called Less Than 5 Grams of Saffron Out of France.

[00:52:36.949] Michel Reilhac: It's a very short piece animated and done by Negar Motivali Meydansha. She is an Iranian immigrant in Europe and through cooking and particularly using the spice of saffron, she reminisces and remembers the culture, the family, the traditions, the country that she had to leave behind. an evocation of what it feels like to be exiled from the country where you were born and that you feel you belong to. It's very moving in the sense that it doesn't call on big emotions, big emotions. and very political dimensions. It's very small. It's about cooking a dish and how the different steps of cooking this dish and using the flavors that are so particular to Iranian cuisine, she can feel in a way a little bit at home through the flavors and the taste of what she's cooking and of course bringing back also incredibly painful memories of having to leave her country in very, very dire conditions.

[00:54:02.762] Kent Bye: Nice, well, I'm really excited to dive into the program. And there's also, I think it's worth mentioning that you have 23 Worlds in the VRChat Worlds Gallery and Dr. Morrow's ritual, I think is worth calling out, especially because it's gonna be split up into two sections just because it's so vast. Natura's Queendom was a winner at Raindance. It's a really beautiful world. And then I haven't seen the Uncanny Lounge. It hasn't launched yet. So looking forward to that from Screaming Color and MetaRick. Noticing that the Reality of Hope from Joe Hunting is a film. That sounds like there's going to be a screening within VRChat, which is exciting to hear. And yeah, any other comments you want to make on this year's selection of the VRChat Worlds Gallery?

[00:54:44.597] Liz Rosenthal: Absolutely. What's really interesting is we have two projects that come from Sony Music Japan, which really shows how important this platform is becoming. And it's a place where they are launching or gathering fans of well-known bands. So one is a virtual band called Fusamusa. It's amazing. It's one of the most crazy worlds that Michelle and I have experienced. So it's a virtual band that Sony represent, and they chose to build a crazy world of performance in VRChat. And the second one is called Yuta Rouge, which features a really well-known Vocaloid producer, Kikyu, who tours all around the world. So that's another thing. amazing world and performance uh vj performance that you go through so that says something really about the platform that beyond you know the most incredible world builders some of them who work completely alone or on the with the community in vr chat there are also big players that are starting to use this platform in a significant way

[00:55:47.372] Michel Reilhac: But as a rule, this year is the same as the other years and more by showing the unbelievable creativity, diversity of genres and the virtuosity of these individuals, these people who create worlds in record times. In just a few weeks, they come up with the most sophisticated worlds. The sense of solidarity that helps these people make worlds by finding support and help from other members in the community. Year after year, we're seeing the explosion of creativity and imagination happening in VRChat. It's definitely for us where we see the most innovative approaches to immersive right now.

[00:56:41.067] Liz Rosenthal: I think it's a real understanding of what this medium means and also what social and multi-person experiences in virtual worlds really mean. These world builders are creating this new art form and entertainment form and We see things that have never been invented or never happened that are made by larger production companies and studios being iterated on this platform. So we really recommend everyone spends a lot of time in our world's gallery because in the best world section, because you will see things that you cannot imagine could be created. invented. And Michelle and I are always super excited about our time we spend with Mike Salmon, who is the producer of the section, who does a long list of projects. And we watch over 100 with him during our selection time. And we have about an hour and a half every day. And it's always great excitement. We go into it. It's always very intense because we have a back to back process over four weeks of being in headset. And we have to sort of limit our VR chats selection time is about an hour and a half just before lunch so we can recover.

[00:57:50.390] Kent Bye: Yeah. And as I went through the list, I think all but three were available already. I'll have a list in the show notes for people to check out if they want to see some ahead of time. I also recommend checking it out on site because you end up doing it with other festival attendees and it can be a real bonding moment to go through some of these worlds and explore. But everything but Natura's Queendom, Uncanny Lounge, as well as Mirage, I didn't see are available yet. And they may be available ahead of the fest as well. Yeah, I'm looking forward to doing my work ahead of the festival to check out everything before I get onto the island.

[00:58:21.654] Liz Rosenthal: That's right. And also just to point out with the VR chat was that Mike and the people that he has to do the guides are really amazing. It's like a whole scripted tour through the world. So the actual experience, like you said, of being together, but also with the guides is really, really special.

[00:58:39.738] Michel Reilhac: Like all the other years, if you go to our VR chat world, Venice Immersive 2025, you will have on the main square of our world, you will have portals giving you access to every single of these worlds directly. So you can just use this as a starting point.

[00:59:00.256] Kent Bye: Nice. And I know each year there's a College Biennale. This year, there's five selections. We talked about one of them already. I don't know if you want to have any other comment in terms of the College Biennale and projects being featured.

[00:59:10.747] Michel Reilhac: Just the College Biennale is a creative development workshop that we hold every year now for nine years. And it's a place where we select 12 projects. Every year, 12 immersive projects from all over the world in their development phase. They come to Venice, work with us for a week. We invite experts that help them, tutor them, coach them to make the best possible project. And out of the 12 projects, we select one every year that receives a grant of 75,000 euros to make the piece and premiere it at Venice Immersive that same year. So this year, it's the project by Vincenzo Cavallo. relaunching Luigi Broglio, who received that grant. The four other projects, Limousine, First Virtual Suit, Happy Shadow and Out of Nowhere, were all in different editions of the Venice Immersive College in different years and have found ways of making their project a reality and premiering at Venice Immersive this year.

[01:00:14.972] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, we managed to get through the majority of this year's program and really excited to come and be on site and check it all out. Do you have any other final thoughts or any kind of reflections on the state of the industry, where it's all going and as we start to wrap up here?

[01:00:28.942] Liz Rosenthal: One of the really exciting things about our selection is that we have 21 female directors out of the 30 in competition, which is the largest amount of female directors we've ever had. I think back in 2018, we were almost at 50%. So this is... Kind of amazing and really heartwarming to see. And there are many other female directors scattered through the programme. So that's a big piece of news.

[01:00:54.003] Michel Reilhac: And the other thing is that, you know, despite the fact that many people say, oh, we haven't been reading about Immersive for a while. Is it still happening? We thought it was dying, da da da. it's not i mean it's unbelievable how alive the field is creatively speaking it's really unbelievable and for this year seeing you know people like edward berger or doug lyman presenting their first piece in vr at venice immersive is proof that it's alive and growing and attracting more and more talent we see it all the time so the media may not be so focused on reporting on what happens in immersive, but it's not because the media are not looking at it as much that it's not happening. It's actually happening big time.

[01:01:45.259] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Liz and Michelle, I'm really excited to check out this year's program. Thanks so much for joining me here to break it down and give everyone a little bit of a sneak peek of what they can expect on the island. Is there any deadlines people should be aware of in terms of, I know that there's going to be selection for the dates that are opening up for people to make their plans. People should be aware of that. I don't know if that's been announced yet, but that's kind of the next thing. If you've already planned on going, there's a bit of a mad rush to get secured and that comes in different ways for people. That's right. 10 days on the island or so that people have lots of time if they have more time on their island. But it does go quick for these different projects. And so, yeah, just the more preparation you can have, the better. But I don't know if you have any other final thoughts on that point.

[01:02:29.827] Liz Rosenthal: Absolutely. So if you don't get one of the full festival accreditations or an industry pass, which is around 400 euros now, you can get a Venice Immersive only accreditation, which is either 40 euros for two days, 60 euros for five days. And 100 euros for the whole festival, which is a total bargain when you think about the fact that you can see 69 incredible projects, many of them world premieres and projects you might never get to see again. And also be on the island and have an opportunity to meet with all kinds of people because it's such an easy place because our whole community is. both the creatives and the stakeholders and financiers, distributors, venues, producers are all in the same place. So it's quite an amazing space. You can also go to the talks program and the presentations of the projects that we selected for the immersive market. That's in the market and the busiest time is during the first half and probably the most competitive time to get tickets because our tickets open, I think it's three days before the festival starts. And Everybody goes online and tries to get tickets. And there's a whole, we have a big WhatsApp group. It's a Ben SMS WhatsApp group that I would recommend you join. You can get in touch with us because we can just put you into that. That's a good place to share information. But if you really want to see more things and have a quieter time where the networking is not the key thing. The key reason why you're coming to them is we strongly recommend maybe coming in the second half of the festival. And we also have a very good waitlist system. So a lot of the time they may have been booked. We have no shows. And so you can put your name on the waitlist on projects and generally you get to see things. Mm-hmm.

[01:04:10.984] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I usually block out some time on the Saturday to try to see the gap financing. That's always great to see those presentations. And yeah, it's very much a destination festival where people come and once they're there, they're usually there. So it's a great place to meet people, see what's happening in the industry. You really see like the most world premieres on the festival circuit for XR projects. And yeah, there's like everybody is there also on the island.

[01:04:36.768] Michel Reilhac: You need to be there physically because this is one question that we hear often. Is there a way to participate in Venice Immersive remotely? And the answer is no. You have to be in Venice to see everything we've programmed. except for the Worlds Gallery, for our selections of the worlds on VRChat. Those worlds are available and accessible online by connecting to our Venice Immersive 2025 VRChat world, as I said. And from there, you have a hub with portals connecting you to all the worlds that we have selected. But for the rest, you have to come to Venice. It's worth it.

[01:05:15.805] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, listen, Michelle, thanks so much again for taking the time to talk about this year's program. And again, I'm really excited to be there again to check it all out. Thank you, Kent.

[01:05:25.374] Liz Rosenthal: Thank you so much, Kent. You always are so amazing with your incredible coverage of what we do and what everybody is doing in the field. See you in Venice.

[01:05:34.909] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.

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#1650: Sneak Peak of Venice Immersive 2025 Selection with Curators Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac