The Ferryman Collective were back at SXSW presenting another immersive theatre piece in virtual reality, but this time they were translating an adapted a piece called Find WiiLii that was originally produced in South Korea by GiiÖii Immersive Studio...
Bag of Worms is a live XR sketch comedy performance developed by Matt Romein in collaboration with Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey that showed as a part of the ONX + DocLab MoCap Stage at IDFA DocLab 2022. It’s difficult to fully describe the...
Horizon is a one-on-one immersive theater piece where an audience member is asked a series of questions by a 15-year old to imagine their future 30 years from now in 2052. It ends up being a world building exercise where the audience has to create...
Mandala: A Brief Moment in Time is an immersive theater experience for 3-6 people that uses group discussions to tell different stories from Buddhism around the themes of suffering, happiness, hungry ghosts, & living the good life. There's a moral...
All That Remains is a surreal embodied adventure through liminal moments that is open-ended enough to leave a lot of room for the audience to project a wide range of associative meaning, memories, or emotions onto it. It is the closest that I've...
Gumball Dreams is the latest immersive theatre production in VRChat by The Ferryman Collective, who previously produced Welcome to Respite: The Severance Theory. They just had their World Premiere last week participating in competition at SXSW, and...
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in collaboration with Artizen producers Ana Brzezińska and René J. Pinnell commissioned & produced four VR pieces that premiered at the inaugural Quillsfest, which was a two-day event November 19-20 held within the...
The MetaMovie Presents: Alien Rescue is one of the most immersive experiences I've had in VR. It's part Cinematic Adventure, part Immersive Theater, and part game that's fusing the affordances of each of these different mediums in a unique way...
The Severance Theory: Welcome to Respite is a VR adaptation of an immersive theatre piece of the same name originally produced in 2019 by CoAct Productions founder Lyndsie Scoggin. Immersive theatre & VR performer Deirdre Lyons did some voice work...
Dream was a series of 10 live performances over 8 days that used motion captured actors who had virtual embodiments set within an immersive storyworld of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream powered by the Unreal Engine. This project was a research...
Kiira Benzing's Loveseat was an ambitious fusion of live theater performance with VR technologies that premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019. They performed live for the audience in Venice while wearing VR headets as their performances were...
Tender Claws continues to be one of the most innovative studios pushing forward what's possible for immersive storytelling in VR by launching a Tempest, which is a live, immersive theater show within The Under Presents. It's a show that blends the...
Anti-Gone is a mixed reality play that features two actors performing in front of a wall that has an open, virtual world projected on it. One of the actors spends the majority of the time in VR navigating this world and interacting with the other...
All Kinds of Limbo featured the ability to show a volumetric-captured, virtual reality performance to 20 users within the Oculus Quest. Nubiya Brandon narrates her experience of being a mixed-race woman in the United Kingdom, and takes a tour...
The Book of Distance is one of the best VR narratives or immersive stories I've ever seen. Director Randall Okita tells the story of his grandfather Yonezo Okita's journey from Hiroshima, Japan to Canada in 1935 to begin a new life. It has some...
Scarecrow is an one-on-one immersive theater piece where you engage with an actor in virtual reality. Every person gets the same structure of a story, but the interactions are customized based upon your actions within the piece. There are a number...
Alexander Devriendt is an immersive theater creator with the company Ontroerend Goed, and he was presenting an interactive piece about artificial intelligence called Artificial: Room One. It was an early-iteration prototype that is starting to...
Tender Claws' The Under Presents is a landmark experience in the evolution of immersive storytelling. It packs in so many narrative innovations, novel game mechanics, experimental VR interactions, and even includes live immersive theater actors in a...
Punchdrunk is a 20 year-old immersive theater company who likes to blur the line between what's real and what's an imaginal dream-like storyworld. They collaborated with Samsung in 2016 to create a blend of immersive theater and virtual reality in...
Alex Coulombe's Agile Lens takes an interdisciplinary approach to immersive technologies at the intersection between theater and architecture. He was showing off a demo piece called That Kind of Guy at XR for Change, which explored a variety of...
Tenderclaws debuted The Under experience at Sundance that features live immersive actors from the Piehole theater troupe. Actors embody different characters within a storyworld that has free roaming, non-verbal participants, who need to use their...
Wolves in the Walls is a narrative VR piece based upon a Neil Gaiman novel that explores object interactions and cultivating a connection to a virtual character. It's a project that originally started as a project within Oculus Story Studio, but was...
Immersive theater is on a collision course with virtual reality. There are so many best practices for interactive storytelling that are easily translatable into VR. Immersive Theater troupe Third Rail Projects produced the acclaimed Then She Fell...
Live Action Role Playing (LARPing) is something that emerged out of table top games like Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s driven by a desire to be more immersed in living out fantasy scenarios. Boffer LARPs use foam weapons to simulate D&D-style...
Tommy Honton is an experiential designer in the immersive theater space, and he's helped to design interactive narratives that can handle a range of different disruptive responses that can ruin the experience for other people. One question for all...
Punchdrunk's immersive theater piece of Sleep No More opened in March 2011, and it's inspired countless experiential designers of immersive theater, and virtual and augmented reality experiences. It was a paradigm shift that broke the fourth wall...
The National Theatre has created an Immersive Storytelling Studio to better understand the practices, protocols, opportunities of how virtual and augmented reality technologies are creating new storytelling possibilities. They collaborated with the...
Dungeons & Dragons is a form of collaborative storytelling that isn't constrained by time or budget. Because it's all happening within the theater of the mind, then if you can imagine it, then it can be constructed instantaneously within everyone's...