Just got back from Venice Immersive: after 10 years in XR, now what?
Why I think the best is yet to come
I’m just coming back from the Venice Biennale in Italy, where the Immersive section, launched in 2017 by Michel Reilhac and Liz Rosenthal, has established itself over the years as the hotspot reunion of the VR community in Europe and the world at large.
It’s always such a pleasure to go to Venice: the city is the most beautiful in the world (in my eyes), you can enjoy the late summer and - most importantly - people are happy to be there, which is grounds for relaxed, friendly conversations about projects and the future of our industry.
I myself have been part of the professional Immersive community for 10 years now, having followed the whole Oculus saga in 2014, and started making my own projects for Samsung Gear in 2016. Before that, I was a young graduate trying to make it in the movie industry, after a first few experiences in the tech world.
Since then, I have been part of a French startup using VR to train astronauts during parabolic flights (Orbital Views), made my own creative projects with a motley crew of 3D artists, programmers and music composers (Motion Works), and joined the studio behind some of the biggest successes in VR at the time (Novelab).
I have made Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality applications, games and narrative experiences, for platforms ranging from PCVR (Rift, Vive) to standalone headsets (the whole Quest line) and smart glasses, mobile phones or physical installations - even working with some more exotic setups like the ultrasonic haptics platform Emerge.
My role in these projects have ranged from Producer (project manager) to Line Producer (account manager) and Executive Producer (business development), and I have had the good fortune to work with people from companies such as Meta, Google, Apple, The New York Times, TIME, Sony, Paramount and many other not-as-glamorous but equally-competent smaller firms.
In some cases, I wrote, directed - and even starred in! - these projects. I like to think that I have a good eye and I was trained in sociology, so I try to always bring into consideration the creative as well as the technical and commercial aspects of a project, in order to understand how it fits into the industry at large.
What Now?
For the longest time (really 10 years, as far as I know), the VR industry has been struggling to find a sustainable source of revenue, oscillating from either the subsidies of giant companies such as Meta, or the public support of European film funds, with the French CNC leading the charge.
This dynamic has propped up studios across the US and Europe, which were good concentrations of human expertise but were too weak to fly on their own - many of them having had to close or at least reduce their staffing with the ebbs and flow of corporate strategy and public policies.
It now seems pretty clear that two strands of Immersive are growing separately:
Location-based Experiences (LBE) are installations commissioned or licensed by a museum, entertainment center or theme park: they are often related to a topic (in the case of museums) or an IP (for theme parks) and can take the form of large, complex, and technically diverse single or multiplayer deployments (example)
Online streaming and distribution of experiences - through platforms such as Steam, the Meta Quest or other app stores - allows users to enjoy at home the content (games, apps, shows) of their choosing, for free or for a fee
None of this will come as a surprise to any seasoned follower of the VR space; however, it is the distinct separation - in terms of types of projects, human expertise, business models and funding sources - between studios pursuing LBE or Online productions that is becoming more and more clear. Whereas there will still be some overlap lingering, most studios seem to now have chosen one or the other form of production and stick to it.
Enter Acute Immersive
We have joined forces with Anthony Maes in late 2024 to build Acute, a streaming platform where professionals can share their Immersive Videos on Apple Vision Pro.
I want to explain here why this is the biggest opportunity we see on the horizon.
Apple has crossed a threshold with the Vision Pro. In 10 years, I have seen
dozenshundreds of immersive videos: the quality of the experience you have with AVP is simply unmatched. It actually feels like you’re there.It is the only company with any chance to bring VR to the masses. Meta and Google simply don’t have the commercial appeal of Apple - it’s not even close.
There is finally an easy way to make “VR”: grab the new Blackmagic Immersive camera, shoot your content, edit it and voilà, you made a show. The requirement to use real-time graphic engines was a major hindrance to the creation of content by professionals, who have historically been trained on film production pipelines: pre-production, production, post-production etc. This is really different to a software development process (Unity, Unreal).
Immersive filmmakers need a distribution platform. There is simply no place for professionals to share their work on AVP today, none. Acute enables this through a series of tools that are inspired from traditional film production software (for example Frame.io and Shotgrid, or Vimeo and YouTube to some extent, with many others). We are not reinventing the wheel: we are adapting it to the headset.
“But Paul, what about the price? What about the audience? Isn’t $3,500 a little steep for mass adoption?” Listen, it’s a developer kit. It was clearly positioned from the beginning - despite the naysayers - as a tool for professionals to create content, before the release of a more budget-friendly consumer version.
Sure, we can discuss whether the launch of AVP was a full success or not, but it can’t distract you from the fact that this is only the beginning. In ~2 years, Apple will launch the Apple Vision Air - or its equivalent - and by then, the content library (apps, shows, games) will have grown significantly in size.
In the meantime, we are helping filmmakers (and producers, studios, agencies) to adopt immersive tools by providing them with a platform where they can show, share and sell their work made for headsets. It’s a small industry, but have no doubt: it is growing.
Next month, I will detail how we plan to do this - and who I think will benefit most from this coming wave of Immersive productions.
Cheers!
Enjoyed this? Subscribe, fool! I plan to post around 1 article / month, as Immersive inevitably grows into a mega-behemoth of an industry.