Everything Immersive This Year — 2019
Milestones month by month across virtual reality, theatre, escape rooms, theme parks, and more
What a year, folks! Our immersive universe keeps getting bigger and brighter even time we turn around. Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen so much happen: the launch of a real consumer-ready standalone VR headset with the Oculus Quest; increasingly ambitious immersive marketing pop-ups like HBO’s Bleed for the Throne; the inklings of a resurgence in the alternate reality game format with campaigns from Harry Styles and Netflix’s Stranger Things; an arms race between selfie factories like 29Rooms, Candytopia, Museum of Ice Cream as they take over the country; location-based VR companies launching high-profile experiences with well-known IP like How to Train Your Dragon, Avengers, and Jumanji; and the long-awaited opening of the immersive Star Wars: Galaxy’s edge land at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Plus, creators pushing the envelope everywhere we look, across VR/AR, escape rooms, LARP, theatre, and more, whether it’s for an audience of one or one hundred.
Here’s some stats on all of the immersive shows and experiences we here at No Proscenium have been tracking (source: No Proscenium internal data, 2019):
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And now, without further ado…
No Proscenium’s 2019 In Immersive
January
At the tail end of 2018, Netflix releases Bandersnatch, an interactive “choose your own adventure” style film from the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. Bandersnatch presents viewers with a branching narrative where participants can impact what happens next and potentially see multiple endings to the story.
Tragedy strikes in the escape room world when five teenage girls are killed at an escape room in Poland, after a fire breaks out in the facility’s lobby a result of an unsealed gas cylinder. Reports say the girls died from smoke inhalation during a birthday celebration, after being locked in a room with no emergency exit.
Pokémon GO creator Niantic closes a $190M funding round as it prepares its next real-world augmented reality game, Wizards Unite, based upon the Harry Potter universe, to be released later in 2019.
Commonwealth Shakespeare Company releases Hamlet 360: Thy Father’s Spirit, a virtual reality film produced by the company in collaboration with Google, Graham Sack, and Quentin Little. The 360 film condenses Hamlet down to 61 minutes.
Alita: Battle Angel goes all out with immersive marketing pop-ups in LA, NYC, and Austin. In Passport to Iron City, a collaboration between The Seelig Group (TSG Entertainment), iam8bit, 20th Century Fox, and Lightstorm Entertainment, participants can enter the fictional “Iron City” setting of the film, where they interact with performers, go on quests and solve puzzles, play games, and do their best at a MotorBall race against the other teams.
Refinery29’s traveling immersive art installation 29Rooms announces an expansion plan to be rolled out in conjunction with a new partnership with IMG. The 2019 29Rooms tour is expected to travel to 6 U.S. cities and 2 international ones, many for the first time, with possible pop-ups in Europe, Australia, and Asia in the future.
Royal Shakespeare Company announces a new project with immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and Epic Games, the creators of Fortnite, through a government funded immersive entertainment initiative. Public body Innovate UK has awards £18 million in funding as part of its “Audiences of the Future” program, which aims to make the UK a leader in immersive technologies.
February
Oculus shows off a sneak peek of a virtual reality-immersive theatre hybrid experience by indie studio Tender Claws (Virtual Virtual Reality, Tendar) and theatre troupe Piehole called The Under Presents at Sundance’s New Frontier Program; the experience will go on to be officially released at the end of the year. Meanwhile YouTube phenom Poppy shows up in an AR experience at Sundance in A Jester’s Tale, created by RYOT and 1RIC (Terminal 3) for the Magic Leap. And Nonny de la Peña’s Emblematic Group shows off REACH, a new VR platform to capture locations in 3D and make them easily available to the public.
Russian artist Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU makes waves in Paris as it finally opens to the public, though the project experiences multiple logistical and technical issues. The sprawling film and art project includes multiple screening rooms, period-appropriate cuisine, an apartment where performers live for a month in full view of the public, as well as other performance art and theatre elements.
H&M takes a page from Westworld and announces that its Spring fashion show will take place in Sedona, Arizona in March and take the form of an immersive theatre project, rather than a typical runway show or lavish party.
A live action role-playing event in Detroit promises to let participants re-enact the fateful events of the doomed Fyre Festival; the LARP event, which began as a joke, is subsequently cancelled a few months later after failing to find a home.
Punchdrunk announces a new permanent venue in the UK as they sign a lease to become the latest resident of the Woolwich Creative District in London. Work on the new multi-building venue is expected to be completed in 2020. Meanwhile Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett describes his newfound insights to the Guardian that “playable theatre is the future.”
Cutting edge performance artist Marina Abramovic (The Artist is Present, 512 Hours) creates her first mixed reality performance, The Life in Mixed Reality (a wearable augmented experience), using Magic Leap headsets. Attendees at the Serpentine Gallery can interact with a holographic version of the Abramovic while wearing the AR goggles. Abramovic later announces her intention to sell the work with Christie’s at their Frieze Week auctions in London in October 2020.
In London, Big Dreamer Productions announces Space 18, a new venue dedicated to immersive and interactive entertainment. It’s expected to combine seven buildings and cover 25,000 square feet in total. The first tenant will be a 90-minute zombie-themed interactive experience called Variant 31; it is later announced that Variant 31 has been delayed and won’t launch until later that fall.
ILMxLAB and Magic Leap release Star Wars: Project Porg, a mixed reality experience which allows anybody with a Magic Leap headset to drop these fluffy, adorable creatures from The Last Jedi into their own homes using technology. Star Wars: Project Porg is available as a free download for Magic Leap owners.
The high-end headset the Varjo VR-1 makes waves in the XR community as the new headset boasts the highest fidelity of any virtual reality goggles thus far, but also costs a cool $6,000.
The History of the Future by Blake J. Harris, an accounting of the modern resurgence of VR through the lens of Oculus, is published and quickly becomes a bestselling book.
Meow Wolf announces yet another new location, this time setting its eyes on Phoenix. The company plans to build an exhibition and hotel concept in the heart of the Roosevelt Row Arts District in Downtown Phoenix, making this their 5th branch. (In 2018, Meow Wolf announced plans for new permanent venues in Denver, Las Vegas and Washington, DC, as well.)
Microsoft drops details around HoloLens 2, the followup to its first augmented reality headset, as it continues to pursue the enterprise market for XR.
The 2nd Immersive Design Summit (co-produced by First Person Travel, Epic Immersive, and No Proscenium) commissions the first ever state of the industry survey and report, to be published during the event. The report, authored by Ricky Brigante (formerly of Inside the Magic and also an occasional contributor to No Proscenium), estimates the immersive industry to be valued at a whopping $4.5 billion, and that’s without even counting the themed entertainment sector.
March
Arts publication Hyperallergic publishes a piece by writer Erin Joyce which criticizes immersive installation art company Meow Wolf and their recently announced expansion plans into Phoenix. Joyce calls the company “a supreme act of late stage capitalism disguised through the collective’s mantra of the underdog as art savior.”
SXSW finds itself host to one of the most epic immersive marketing pop-ups ever as HBO, in collaboration with Mycotoo and Giant Spoon, create a Game of Thrones activation “Bleed for the Throne.” The recreation of Westeros doubles as both promotion for the last season of the hit TV show but also a blood drive for the American Red Cross. And AT&T and Magic Leap also announce their exclusive GoT immersive experience The Dead Must Die, showing at AT&T stores. In The Dead Must Die, participants can battle a White Walker and the Night King in a custom built set using augmented reality.
Google announces that it is shutting down its Spotlight Stories Studio. The Studio is perhaps best known for the short film Pearl, directed by Patrick Osborne, which was the first ever VR film nominated for an Oscar.
Nintendo gets into the VR game through its announcement of a new VR kit designed for kids, one of its ongoing series of foldable Labo cardboard kits for the Nintendo Switch.
Dziobak Larp Studio announces they are ceasing operations, effective immediately, leaving the fate of the popular College of Wizardry and some of their other LARP experiences uncertain. The company P, led by Christopher Sandberg, later steps in to rescue the College of Wizardry LARP through a massive crowdfunding campaign.
Game developer Media Molecule’s Dreams — a game about making games — catches the attention of Punchdrunk; the theatre company starts using the platform to design sets for future immersive productions, reports Newsweek.
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April
Art collective Meow Wolf open their first “dark ride” at Elitch Gardens Theme & Water Park in Denver; the ride, called Kaleidoscape, puts attendees inside a simulator that’s operated by QDOT or the Quantum Department of Transportation, which is essentially “a subway system that connects the multiverse.”
The Royal Shakespeare Company talks to Variety about how Magic Leap and video games are changing the course of their future, such as in their re-enactment of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man from “As You Like It,” in an AR experience sized for tabletop viewing.
The studio behind procedurally generated video game No Man’s Sky announced an upcoming VR version, where players will be able to virtually explore the game’s deterministic open world universe, which includes over 18 quintillion planets.
Escape room owners in New York City get the news that their local government is reclassifying what category of business they operate under, leading to multiple citations and even some venue shutdowns in the city. The local escape room industry in NYC takes months to recover.
Musician Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) releases a multiplayer AR experience together with Google called PHAROS AR. The app that lets fans interact with a hologram of the musician within a “virtual manifestation of Childish’s fan universe.”
Podcaster Dan Carlin of Hardcore History and Common Sense finds himself as the voice of a brand new location-based virtual reality experience when War Remains premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival’s VR arcade. Created in collaboration with Flight School and Madison Wells Media, the experience takes one participant at a time into the trenches of WWI through haptic and wind technology and a walkable, built set that mirrors what the user sees in the headset.
May
Game Of Thrones author George R.R. Martin announces that he has taken on a new role as Chief World Builder at Meow Wolf.
The Oculus Quest, a 6 degrees of freedom, untethered, consumer-friendly VR headset, finally hits store shelves. The portable headset makes a splash with launch titles like Vader Immortal; Job Simulator; Virtual Virtual Reality; Bonfire; Moss; Beat Saber; Superhot and more.
After months of anticipation, the long-awaited Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opens at Disneyland in Anaheim, CA: a 14-acre, immersive, interactive land ready for audience participation, where every cast member has a character and a backstory. The new venture is “is so ambitious Disneyland fans may not be ready for it,” says the LA Times. The Walt Disney World version of Batuu opens a few months later in August.
Exeunt Magazine probes participant reactions to the immersive theatre show Barzakh in London; the publication asks some important questions about audience consent and pushing audience boundaries when it comes to the show’s tactics of using extreme temperatures, clothing removal, strobe lighting, and more.
Stanford’s Jeremy Bailenson and other researchers release a report where they found that interacting with a virtual person in augmented reality changes people’s behaviors, even after the goggles are removed.
June
The Founder of Vrai Pictures and former lead VR filmmaker for Google, Jessica Brillhart, is named Director of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies’ Mixed Reality Lab.
Valve Index, the high end PC VR headset, launches with a price tag of $999. VR journalist Kent Bye says the Index’s controllers “enable new open hand interactions that make grabbing objects in VR so much more visceral and real for incredible hand presence.”
Wired calls the upcoming The Lion King remake, which is being shot entirely in VR, the “future of cinema.” Director Jon Favreau uses 360-degree virtual environments full of digitized animals as “sets” for the film and is able to walk around in VR with is team to plan shots while real-life camera crews execute them in VR. The Lion King ends up being filmed entirely in virtual reality except for single photographed shot.
Punchdrunk International announce that they’re working with Sky Productions on a new TV series starring Jude Law called The Third Day, where a man encounters the secretive inhabitants of a mysterious island off the British coast. Dennis Kelly of Utopia will be the series’ writer and co-creator. The show is expected to air in the UK and Ireland on Sky Atlantic and in the US on HBO in 2020.
The first revenue reports start rolling in for Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, with the AR-based game falling far short of what Pokémon Go had previously achieved during its launch. Game reviewers also criticize the game’s bloated nature and overly complex mechanics.
At a Vox Media conference, Oculus VP of AR/VR Andrew Bosworth reports that the Oculus Quest has already sold $5 million of content.
TodayTix releases information that indicates global sales of immersive theatre performances have grown 600% from 2016 to 2018 on their ticketing platform.
The makers behind smash hit VR rhythm game Beat Saber release a new music pack featuring the songs of Grammy award-winning rock band Imagine Dragons following the success of March’s pack with music from Canadian EDM label Monstercat; future expansions launched in 2019 will include hits from Panic! At the Disco and Green Day as well as 360-degree levels at the end of the year.
Apple announces a bevy of ARKit features at WWDC including people occlusion, motion capture, and more; Microsoft demos the upcoming Minecraft Earth augmented reality experience at the conference, as well.
July
It’s Sleep No More meets shopping: experiential shopping venue SHOWFIELDS premieres House of SHOWFIELDS in New York City; it’s an attempt to mix immersive theatre with retail, focusing upon brands that typically only have an Internet presence. Consumers who enter the House can encounter actors who educate them about the products on display, while trying out these products.
Artist Risa Puno, in collaboration with arts organization Creative Time, opens The Privilege of Escape in New York City. The free, high-profile escape room experience is meant to challenge notions about privilege and equality through an interactive experience with live actors and physical game play, with a twist. Approximately 3,000 people play the game during its limited time run.
Netflix’s Stranger Things, in partnership with 22squared and m ss ng p eces, creates a Baskin Robbins-sponsored alternate reality game in order to promote season three of the hit TV show. Operation Scoop Snoop, as it is known, only uses retro technology from the ’80s. Three real-life Baskin Robbins locations get transformed into “Scoops Ahoy” locations, with players waiting up to three hours to get inside. And the first person to finish the experience wins a lifetime supply of ice cream along with a set visit for the filming of season four of the popular show.
The real-world augmented reality game Minecraft Earth — created in the vein of Pokémon GO — begins a limited iOS beta program in Seattle and London.
After opening in late 2018, San Francisco’s augmented and virtual reality venue ONEDOME closes its doors permanently, despite raising $5.4 million in funding.
August
Japanese art collective teamLab announces that it’s backing out of its expansion into North America; the previously announced Brooklyn teamLab location has been put on hold, citing the need to “rethink [the] strategy for entering the American market.”
The founders of the Museum of Ice Cream close a $40M Series A round to fund a spin-off company called Figure8. Figure8 will become the parent company over the Museum of Ice Cream and focus upon creating what they are calling “experiums” — the intersection of experiences and museums. The company will later open a new permanent location in New York City at the end of the year.
Room Escape Artist publishes the 5 Year US Escape Room Industry Report, tracking long term trends in the escape game business from 2014–2019.
Scholar Adam Alston publishes an essay in Contemporary Theatre Review tying together the current state of topics like safety, risk, speculation, and more in the immersive industry.
Visitors to immersive art venue Meow Wolf this summer may have found themselves stumbling upon an alternate reality game trailhead within the House of Eternal Return. The so-called Society of Peripheral Studies announces a new Citizen Scientist Initiative, inviting all interested parties to join in the fun.
September
IKEA and Sonos create what they call an “immersive theatre experience” in London called The Sound Affect. The work is created in collaboration with UK theatre company Les Enfants Terribles (Inside Pussy Riot, Alice’s Adventures Underground). The intent is to “allow participants to discover how sound transforms their surroundings as they lose themselves in a multi-sensory narrative led by sound.”
LA’s Scout Expedition Company re-opens their hit immersive theatre show The Nest, which blends elements of walking simulators, escape rooms, and podcasts, in a new permanent location in Mid-City.
The company behind popular selfie factory Candytopia announces a partnership with the owners of the Toys ‘R’ Us brand to bring a touring, holiday-themed immersive pop-up to cities throughout the next year, capitalizing upon nostalgia for the recently shuttered brick-and-mortar stores.
Fireproof Games, makers of the popular The Room series of games for mobile devices, announce an upcoming VR sequel to the series as they try tackling the unique affordances of the medium. The new chapter of this award-winning puzzler might end up becoming the great “escape room-meets-VR game for the home” title that immersive fans have been waiting for.
During their annual convention Oculus Connect, Oculus announces upcoming features for the Quest standalone headset including native hand-tracking and the ability to play Rift-only experiences on a Quest using cable and PC gaming rig; the team also announces an upcoming project involving augmented reality goggles.
The Guardian covers the new safety and security measures being put in place by the Guild of Misrule for their immersive production of The Wolf of Wall Street in London, based upon their experiences with bad audience behavior in their previous productions like The Great Gatsby. These include “door security, personal alarm buttons, a code-word system to flag problematic audience members, CCTV cameras, plus a safeguarding, consent and inclusion coordinator.”
A new mixed reality experience called These Sleepless Nights, presented by The Next Amendment, premieres at Venice Film Festival. Created by Gabo Arora, and with music by Phillip Glass for the Magic Leap headset, the experience addresses the housing crisis in the USA using immersive technology.
Pittsburgh theatre company Bricolage debut their newest immersive show, Project Amelia, an interactive production about the perils of technology, with multiple endings driven by the audience participation. The production is created in collaboration with Probable Models (a think tank focused on ethics in the tech industry) and is also being used as an experiment by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.
(Content warning: sexual assault) A team of Stanford University students and alums release Dear Visitor, an AR experience created to reshape the site of Chanel Miller’s (previously known only as “Emily Doe”) assault on campus. The location has since been renovated and turned into a “contemplative garden,” but the administration refused to place quotes from Miller’s victim impact statement on a plaque at the site, despite a previous agreement to do so. Using an iPad, visitors to the garden can now listen to student perspectives, hear Miller’s words, share their own thoughts, and see the garden and plaques as originally envisioned, all using augmented reality.
Dr. Harry Farmer reports on the results of a VR empathy study in Immerse, challenging the claim that virtual reality is the “ultimate empathy machine.” The study finds no meaningful difference in attitudes towards in participants between a headset or a tablet after passively watching the same 360 film.
Oklahoma City’s Factory Obscura open phase 2 of their permanent immersive art venue MIX-TAPE, which includes a portal to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe. Working with a local accessibility consulting form, the new experience is designed to be largely ADA wheelchair compliant, but also so that people with blindness, hearing impairment, autism, and other abilities can enjoy it.
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October
Marvel Studios and ILMxLAB collaborate to launch the VOID’s latest “hyper reality” experience, Avengers: Damage Control. In this experience, participants take on the role of new recruits who must use the latest Wakandan/Stark hybrid tech designed by Shuri and help the post-Endgame Avengers defeat a resurgent evil. Players find themselves in virtual reality alongside characters from the popular film series including Spider-Man, Ant Man, The Wasp, and Dr. Strange.
Windy City Playhouse closes their long-running immersive play Southern Gothic, a soap opera drama set in the 1960s during a birthday party; the voyeuristic sandbox show ran continuously in Chicago after opening in February 2018.
Blackout, the immersive horror experience that launched a thousand copycats, returns for its 10th anniversary in New York City; this will be their last season. The team raises over $28,000 on Kickstarter from ardent fans in advance of their farewell show.
Tilt Five raises over $1.7 million through a Kickstarter campaign to create augmented reality goggles which enable holograms to be used in tabletop gaming; the project marries aspects of video games and board games in a social setting.
Meow Wolf co-founder Vince Kadlubek announces that he’ll be stepping down from the role of CEO at the organization, with the role of co-CEOs to be assumed by a team of three individuals: Ali Rubinstein, Carl Christensen, and Jim Ward (Chief of Content).
CBS Sunday Morning and journalist David Pogue features escape rooms as a hobby quickly gaining popularity among the American public on the popular news show.
Cards Against Humanity announces that it will open a new dedicated game cafe in Chicago which will also act as a permanent home for the interactive live game experience The Last Defender and its upcoming sequel. The venue is expected to open in Logan Square early next year.
In partnership with Angry Hero and MWM Universe, artist Hebru Brantley opens Nevermore Park, an immersive “art park of dreams” that places black heroes at the center of its story. Nevermore Park is located in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood.
November
Fable Studio release the third and final chapter of Wolves in the Walls, a VR adaptation of the book by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, featuring the voices of Jeffrey Wright, Noah Schnapp, and more. The piece uses immersive theatre techniques to create a “virtual being” named Lucy; it created in collaboration with New York City’s Third Rail Projects, the makers of Then She Fell. The experience is available for free on Oculus Rift.
The Verge tackles the arms race between immersive art experiences and what it means for the “experience economy,” noting the fierce competition between companies like Meow Wolf, 29Rooms, Candytopia, and Museum of Ice Cream. Meanwhile Citylab writer Karen Loew ponders the question of what happens to traditional art museums when pop-up selfie factories appropriate the word “museum” for themselves.
“Vractors” finally become real on a larger scale: indie game studio Tender Claws and Piehole release The Under Presents, exclusively for the Oculus Quest. The Under Presents is an experimental virtual reality piece that mixes together elements of immersive theatre, games, and social VR; the experience includes live performers that players can serendipitously encounter while in the game. (Note: NoPro publisher Noah Nelson worked as a paid consultant on the casting process for The Under Presents.)
Japanese arcade Warehouse Kawasaki closes permanently; fans mourn the loss of the gaming venue famous for detailed interior, styled after Kowloon Walled City, and its cyberpunk garage.
Irreverent TV hosts Desus and Mero complete an escape room with US Democratic Presidential Candidate Elizabeth Warren, perhaps marking the first time an escape room has been used as part of a prominent political campaign.
ILMxLAB release the third and final episode of their award-winning Star Wars VR series, Vader Immortal, participants have the opportunity to go toe to toe with Darth Vader himself in combat in the culmination of the interactive story. The experience is available for Oculus Quest and Rift; the trio of episodes is also free for new Quest owners during the holiday season.
A photo from a Russian news publication showing a virtual reality headset on a cow goes viral; the rationale for putting bovines in an immersive environment is later revealed to be rather mundane (to increase milk production) as social media comes up with no shortage of cow-related puns.
AMC releases the first teaser of their upcoming show Dispatches from Elsewhere. The anthology series, starring Jason Siegel and Sally Field, is based upon the real-life alternate reality game The Jejune Institute, which was run in San Francisco by Nonchalance from 2008 to 2011. The name of the new TV series is taken from the in-world pirate radio show, Dispatches from Elsewhere.
David Byrne announces a new immersive theatre piece co-created with writer Mala Gaonkar to premier in Denver. Theater of the Mind, produced by Denver Center’s Off-Center Program, is expected to open August 2020 and take intimate audiences of only 16 people at a time deep into our understanding of the human brain.
In a surprise announcement, Valve announces a new Half-Life game, Half-Life: Alyx, set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2 and created exclusively for VR headsets including the Valve Index. The game is expected to launch March 2020 and be available on major PC headsets.
The fictional “Visit Eroda” campaign leads alternate reality game fans down a strange rabbit hole in which an ad campaign for a fictional island is revealed to be marketing for… Harry Styles’ new album. There’s a clash of cultures as ardent ARG players find themselves in the same digital spaces as Harry Styles’ fans when it becomes clear who is behind the project.
Beat Games, the Prague-based studio behind hit virtual reality game Beat Saber, announces its acquisition by Facebook. TechCrunch reports that the studio will keep operating independently, but it will become part of Oculus Studios, Facebook’s VR gaming group. Beat Saber will go on to win VR Game of the Year at the 2019 Game Awards in December.
New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley calls “immersive theatre” one of the movements that defined the decade, highlighting Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More and The Drowned Man, Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell, Woodshed Collective/Ma-Yi Theater Company/Ars Nova’s KPOP, and Mister and Mischief’s Escape From Godot.
December
The New Yorker does a deep dive into the uses for virtual reality outside of gaming by sending one of their writers home with an Oculus Quest; writer Patricia Marx speaks to a number of prominent folks in the field as she explores the technology’s uses in non-fiction documentary, sports, workplace training, medicine, and even under water.
The long-anticipated Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge’s “Rise of the Resistance” attraction finally opens December 5 at Walt Disney World in Orlando to critical acclaim as well as long lines of fans; CNet praises its “high tech tricks” and use of “immersive theatre storytelling” techniques. The new ride will open at Disneyland in Anaheim in January of 2020. It is the second of the two major attractions at Black Spire Outpost.
Oculus’ Medium, a 3D sculpting tool for virtual reality widely used in the creation of immersive film and video games, gets acquired by Adobe. The terms of the sale are not immediately disclosed to the public.
Yoram Globus’ Rebel Way Entertainment announces its first project, Tension, a film adaptation of LA’s immersive theatre production The Tension Experience, originally created by Darren Lynn Bousman, Gordon Bijelonic and Clint Sears. In the film Tension, written by Scott Milam, four friends encounter an extreme immersive horror experience on Halloween. Bousman is expected to direct Tension next year.
Magic Leap announces a renaming of their headset in an attempt to appeal to the enterprise market; the newly rebranded Magic Leap 1 will have very minor updates compared to the previous version.
Immersive Everywhere announces a new immersive experience based upon Doctor Who; the show is a collaboration between BBC Studios and the team behind the UK’s longest-running immersive show, The Great Gatsby. The Doctor Who Time Fracture experience is expected to open in central London in Autumn 2020.
It’s been a great year in immersive. Let’s make 2020 even better.
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