SXSW is the ultimate FOMO conference—you can’t see everything, no matter how hard you try. The XR Experience Exhibition, curated for over a decade by Blake Kammerdiener, once again stood out as one of the festival’s highlights. With 31 projects—15 in competition and 16 in the XR Experience Spotlight—this year’s showcase underscored the continued evolution of immersive storytelling, from mixed reality (MR) experiences in real-world settings to dome projections and large-scale, multi-user installations.
The XR Experience Competition featured 15 world premieres, with Cameron Kostopoulos’ In the Current of Being taking home the top prize. This haptic VR experience, co-produced by Onassis ONX, placed users in the shoes of Carolyn Mercer, a survivor of electroshock conversion therapy. Through wearable haptic vests, sleeves, and gloves, participants felt Mercer’s heartbeat, breath, and the tremors she endured, making for one of the most visceral and empathy-driven experiences at SXSW.
Kostopoulos, a previous SXSW Jury Award winner for Body of Mine (2023), continues to promote VR as a tool for advocacy. “He is so into that first-person, walk-in-somebody-else’s-shoes style of storytelling,” Kammerdiener said. “And you can really see his growth as an artist.”
The Jury Award went to Chloé Lee’s Reflections of a Little Red Dot, an open-world documentary exploring a country in transition. Judges praised its subtle yet deeply resonant storytelling, calling it “a universal sense of place.”
Outside the competition, one of the most talked-about VR projects was Zhuzmo’s All I Know About Teacher Li, a documentary on censorship and digital activism in China. Winner of the Venice Immersive Special Jury Prize, it let participants throw origami planes onto a digital grid, unlocking banned reports from exiled activist Teacher Li. The experience of Chinese under draconian lock down, where residents starved and committed suicide, are hidden from the Chinese people. For example, violence in Shenzhen is unknown in Beijing due to strict censorship. Teacher Li switched to Twitter (now X) to avoid censorship and enough people knew about VPNs to avoid the heavy hand of the government. This inspired the blank paper protests which played a role in the lifting of quarantine in China.
The immersive exhibition and accompanying XR conference track are overseen by Blake Kammerdiener, who spends the year talking to hundreds of creators, searching for projects that push boundaries. “I was super pleased to bring in more multi-user, non-headset-based installations,” he told The AI/XR Podcast before theSXSW XR exhibit, which ran three days, from March 9 – 11. This shift allowed more attendees to engage without the throughput limitations of individual VR headsets. Competition winners in 2023 and 2024 were non-headset experiences.
One of the most anticipated debuts was Resolution: A Cinephonic Rhapsody for the Soul, SXSW’s first-ever dome theater experience. A custom-built dome hosted this psychedelic visual album, created by Scott Berman and Tim DeLaughter of The Polyphonic Spree. Reclining in camp chairs, audiences were enveloped by panoramic visuals and sound, redefining what an album-listening experience could be. Had it been released in 1977, I would have seen it ten times. It will be seen on a much larger scale at Cosm venus around the country. Resolution won the SXSW’s film poster award.
Another standout was Proof As If Proof Were Needed, a multi-user projection experience by Blast Theory and Ting-Tong Chang. Participants navigated a virtual Taiwanese home, triggering different scenes as they moved. “They’re tracking where people move on a grid, and what entices them to shift determines what’s shown on-screen,” Kammerdiener explained. The project won the Special Jury Award for its innovative non-linear storytelling.
Ancestors is a 70-minute AI-driven experience by The Smartphone Orchestra, whose speciality is technology-driven experiences (the real world is immersive). Participants (there were around sixty of us) use an app, which asks you to take a selfie. A picture of a young woman is presented. This is my future daughter. I need to find my future wife, who has the same picture on her phone. The daughter is a blend of our selfies. I couldn’t tell. We then were matched with another couple the same way, with a picture on our phones. At the end of the show, everyone in the audience realized we are all related, an exponentially large multi generation family. I wish I could give these people some kind of award. It surely was a contender.
One of the most compelling experiences in the expo was The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, a mobile AR reconstruction of a tragic and largely forgotten event nearly erased from history. They used mobile AR on a tablet to show the horrific events of September, 1906, in Atlanta, where, for four days a white mob, incited by the race-baiting politicians and local newspapers, violently attacked the black community across the city. Using volumetric performances, hand-drawn Quill image and AI animations, this augmented reality project allows audiences to follow writer and editor Jesse Max Barber (Bryonn Bain) as he tries to tell the world this buried truth. This piece was made in a collaboration with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and award-winning Emblematic Group’s director Nonny de la Peña, who has more than a decade of AR/VR experience, alongside a consultancy with director Alton Glass and journalist Retha Hill.
In EchoVision, created by Jiabao Li, participants become bats and navigate a path in VR, using the echolocation of their voice to navigate a maze. AI translated the sound waves into light and movement, allowing users to experience the world as a bat does.
Another innovative entry was theater company Tender Claws’ Face Jumping, which used eye-tracking on the Meta Quest Pro to let participants swap perspectives with what looked like ghosts (like the ones in Caspar), by locking gazes with them. You literally are seeing the world from another perspective. The ghosts are interactive, but they are not live performers featured in co-director Samantha Gorman’s previous VR theater productions The Under Presents and The Tempest.
Uncanny Alley: A New Day is a live performance in VR by the Ferryman Collective, an ensemble of cross-media creators using performance to explore role-playing and drama, which has previously brought Gumball Dreams and Welcome to Respite to SXSW’s XR Exhibition. The new show, Uncanny Alley, features two actors who seamlessly bring multiple characters to life. Audiences will converse with the actors, other audience members and interact with their virtual surroundings. “Our international cast is truly exceptional, featuring talent from film, television, gaming, and Broadway. They bring a diverse range of skills, and are some of the most experienced VR actors in the world today” says Whitton Frank, one of the project’s producers.
The Secret Life of Monsters – The Gateway Experience, is casts you as a recruit in the GEU, a team tasked with exploring parallel realities from a mysterious station known as Gateway. Your first mission takes you into SOLUM, a world full of unique inhabitants and wonderful environments. Not a lot of straight up narrative entertainment at a show like this, so it was a welcome respite from the heavier topics.
Traces: The Grief Processor used the Vision Pro. It’s an interactive VR experience that explores loss, which invites users to upload a picture of someone they miss from their phone before the experience starts. It then becomes a hyer-personalized part of the show. The Apple Vision Pro was also used by The Last Practice and Currents. Now that it’s been in the market for a while, developers have had a chance to explore its potential as a storytelling device. It has more computing power than a Quest 3, which is an Android-based device, but the experiences so far don’t demonstrate technology perceptibly different.
Ways of Knowing: A Navajo Nuclear History was the only straight up 360 live-action documentary I saw at the show. The story of how uranium mining poisoned the Navajo Nation is a well-told tragic tale of epic injustice. A good filmmaker is going to tell a solid and effective story with this material. I have no idea why they would limit their audience using 360. Millions of people need to see this.
Traditionally the format of a concert is an artist on stage and the audience looking forward, however the Pivots show, with XR programmed by Venice Bleach, created a mixed reality concert and AV installation that plunges audiences into 360 digital worlds with live music in spatial audio envelopes the audience in a cocoon of sound.
“This isn’t just a new way to present music—it’s a new revenue model for artists and a way for venues to expand their audience,” says Ristband Director Anne McKinnon. “Pivots and Venice Bleach have been booked for festivals from Shanghai to Vancouver even before releasing their first EPs, also touring art galleries, playing the opening night for film and innovation festivals, and working with companies like Music Team- a platform for independent artists to release and manage their music.”
With an upcoming renovation of the Austin Convention Center, SXSW faces many challenges if it is to remain anchored in downtown Austin. There is the storied 6th street music scene, but it is buried in luxury hotels and high rises now. The media business, of which SXSW is a part, is struggling with high costs and shrinking audiences. The large international audience now has competing SXSW editions in Sydney and London to choose from. Kammerdiener is confident the show will go on. “It’s about discovery. It’s about the people who come, the speakers, the networking. The beauty of SXSW is that it’s so big you can find your own thread through it.” I hope he’s right. XR needs the annual showcase SXSW has provided for the past ten years.
