#1827: ヴェネツィア・イマーシブ2026のVRChatワールドギャラリー回顧（マイク・サーモン）

The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bai, 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 special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of Venice Immersive 2026, today's episode is with Mike Salmon. He's the producer of the Virtual Worlds Gallery of Venice Immersive, where he does scouting of hundreds and hundreds of worlds, and then he basically creates this list that he presents with the curators, Liz Rosenthal and Michelle Riak. They go through and they make the final choices for what to be featured in the VRChat Worlds Gallery, but each year I love to go through each of the different worlds and sit down with Mike to kind of have a recap of all the different worlds that are being featured this year and a little bit of a retrospective. Most of them are sort of Earth-element based, so a lot of immersive worlds, immersive art, And then a lot of fire element in terms of exploration, these vast worlds that you're exploring around and some interactive game components in some of them.

But also a lot more water element this year in terms of like narrative driven immersive worlds, a lot more storytelling that I'm starting to see as well. And so, yeah, just a lot of really interesting exploration of the whole VR chat selection. And this is actually one of the different examples where you can go into the Venice immersive world and actually kind of jump around and see a lot of these worlds. They're available for you to go check out. So you can listen to our conversation and then be inspired to go check out some of the different worlds or go check out all the worlds and then listen to how we break it all down. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Mike happened on Monday, September 7th, 2026 at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Hi, so my name is Mike Salmon, and I work with Liz and Michelle at Venice Immersive, and I help run what's colloquially known as the World Gallery, so the section that focuses on virtual worlds. We look at a number of different platforms,

but quite often the vast majority of the work that we show is using VRChat. Great, and maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Sure. So back in the old days, I used to work at NBCUniversal, and I worked in an innovation team. And my job was to go out and find new technologies and services that Universal might want to do prototypes with and experiment with. And as part of that journey, we got a DK1, and I got entirely obsessed with that device. and much to the annoyance of all of my bosses, kind of refused to look at any other technology and just kept working on that. And so ended up becoming the head of immersive technology at NBCUniversal based out of London. And we worked with a number of different parts of business that were interested in experimenting with virtual reality.

And with that, I worked with a colleague called Marad Nori. We worked on a piece called Halcyon that released in 2018. and then in 2019 we launched a piece that was actually shown at Venice called 1111. And then when I left Universal, started working for myself and that's where I started working for Venice Immersive and also working with the folks at Agog running some of their social experiences, doing regular meetups with creators for them. Nice. And so it's a little bit of an annual tradition to check in about the VRChat Worlds Gallery. I usually, on the way here, I look at all the worlds and go through all of them. And I have to say it's like one of the strongest years I've seen of the selection. It's a lot of really amazing worlds, world building, great diversity, some solid storytelling pieces that I think is maybe a little bit different than previous years that doesn't tend to be as many narrative-driven worlds. And, yeah, just some really impressive world building of different stuff. So you were able to unpack many different gems,

and I think the final selection by Liz and Michelle, which is a really great diversity of different projects. So I'm excited to dive in. And so where do you want to begin in terms of talking about this year's selection? How do you start to think about this year? Well, so essentially I spend a lot of time scouting. I'm always looking for new worlds that might be something that we would look to put in the selection. so over the six years that I've been doing this now I've built up some great relationships with a bunch of the world building community we have some really awesome tour guides who are part of our community that show people around the world they're also great at sending me tidbits of things but a lot of the time what I'm doing is I'm using Blue Sky and I'm following some amazing VRChat photographers so they're sort of journaling the worlds that get main VRChat. So I have a spreadsheet, and whenever I see something that looks kind of interesting,

it goes on the spreadsheet, and then I spend a bunch of time going in and reviewing all those worlds. So this year, for that piece of work, I had a spreadsheet with nearly 800 worlds on it. My spreadsheet now has about 35 or 40 worlds ready for starting to look at for next year. and so during the selection process Liz and Michelle spend pretty much a month here in Venice and they're looking at all the work that's been submitted for the competition and we take an hour each day to go world hopping and so I show them a smaller selection maybe sort of 50 so worlds and then ultimately they then decide what goes into the festival. Nice and so maybe you could just give a shout out to some of the tour guides you had this year. Yeah, so our tour guides do an amazing job. It is a really hard job for them. They have a mixture of people. They have some folks from the XR industry that have been here, done that,

understand all the controls and just want to get going. But then they also have folks who are coming over from the film festival who have never done VR before. And so getting into VR chat as their first ever VR experience experience can be a baptism of fire and over the years they have developed all manner of tricks and skills in order to help people so for example they'll have a prefab on their avatar that allows them to bring out the controllers and so they can point at the buttons and show people what they need to do they have like little pens on their avatars so they can draw lines so that If the tour gets split up, people know where they're going. But I think one of the most fun things is that they also have chairs that they put on their avatar. So if someone gets really stuck, they can click on the chair, they can sit on their avatar, and they can get guided through. So our tour guides are Aris, Blackstart, Yoshix, Shells, Drusiton, Trilo, Nina, Mixi, and Octoplex.

and one of the things that we've started doing over the last couple of years is making sure that we have an Italian speaker on each tour so that we can make sure that we are working with the native language of the city that we're in but one of the other things that they do which is really great is that they also have a subtitle system so we have someone where English or Italian isn't their first language then they can use those subtitles to kind of help that along. It's like a little prototype of all sorts of AR features we're going to have here in the future. It's all happening here in VRChat, so that's really, really cool to see. Well, let's dive into the... Is there anything else that you wanted to mention before we start to dive in? Well, I guess the thing to start with is the fact that we have two worlds in the competition this year. And it always makes me super happy to have titles in the competition because they're in the same competition as everything else that is on this island. And we have world builders who are solo devs,

building things for love and putting it out there and what they're building, they're making in a matter of months. And a lot of the other projects that we have on the island are fantastic, but they're funded by Disney. or they have arts council funding from various European cultural institutions. And so I like to say that we are kind of the punk rock part of the festival. So we have two works in competition this year. We have Nell Blue by Finns and we have Back to the Experience by Jessian. Nice, yeah, and I've had a chance to see both and talk to both creators and really super impressed with Back to the Experience. I thought it was a really amazing documentary form of a guided tour, spatial, cinematic, volumetric, and, yeah, just a really amazing way of telling the story. And, yeah, Fens always does a great job of doing exquisite world building and kind of more of an intimate story, but also still finding ways of dissolving the context and being able to kind of blur different worlds together

in a really magical realism way. That's a lot of fun. So, yeah, and Fenn's not sure if he's going to still have his world available. So by the time this airs, I don't know if it'll still be public, but I'm pretty sure that Back to the Experience will still be out and available, which I highly recommend folks go check out. And, yeah, I don't know if you have any other comments on that or if you wanted to move on to the next experiences. I think only that the level of accomplishment with these titles is incredibly impressive. I think there is a misconception that VRChat worlds are, by their very nature, sort of DIY, and that is the case. But these pieces absolutely stand up shoulder to shoulder with everything else that is in our selection on the island. Yeah, well, let's start to dive into different worlds. Where do you want to begin? Well, I think maybe, I think there's a bit of a theme this year. We choose anything that we think is, well, I usually say artistically interesting, right?

Something, hangout worlds are beautiful but generally don't fit with what we're doing. This year, I think art and sort of gallery spaces seems to be quite a theme this year. So we have like Petriki by Dr. Morrow, which is a world that is built to represent his memories of what he sees as like old Moscow. It's part of his like Moscow trip series. But in its heart, although there is an explorable square and there are sort of cafes and clubs that you can enter, It is a gallery space, and there are four different spaces, three of which are showing a lot of his work. And it's really lovely to see a lot of the physical work that he's done in the past and a lot of photos. And in those photos, you can really see a lot of the inspirations for the works he's done in the past. Yeah, Dr. Morrow is one of the most renowned world builders out there.

And it was actually from our conversation last year that we were talking about Dr. Morrow that I decided to reach out to him and do a whole interview with him and just to talk about his whole process. And so, yeah, he's one of the most interesting creators that are out there. And even though this is a part of his more documentary series, he's always got this kind of Dr. Morrow twist. And the museum in that piece is amazing. His restaurant is amazing. But what I really loved is on the upstairs, when you get back to one of the final rooms, he starts to take some scenes from his existing world and does a kind of deconstruction or artistic rendition of worlds. And I think anybody that's seen a lot of Dr. Morrill's worlds, there's quite a lot of nostalgia of seeing how he's recontextualizing his own artwork within the context of this art that's in this art museum that's in his other VR world. so it's like a very inception-like of many layers. But yeah, he's just like a really incredible creator, and I love seeing his latest piece. And it also has, although this is very much, like the Moscow trip side of his work is very much realism,

it also has those really nice twists of weird, surreal moments where you walk around a corner, and behind a metal fence is a giant pigeon just sort of staring at you. So it still has some of these more surreal, odd moments in it. Yeah, for sure. Wouldn't be a Dr. Morrow piece throughout some of those twists. What else we got? Yeah, so one of the pieces I really, really love is called Limitless Part One, Enter the Void by Hill Jr. And this was a real sort of gem. It's one of those things where it really helps me believe in what I'm doing when it comes to the amount of time that I spend scrolling and finding things. because when I found the world, it was in the sort of hundreds of views. And it's a series of, I think it's 15 different open brush pieces that are all then stitched together in this like super psychedelic journey with some like really crazy sort of proggy music playing in the background.

and I sort of instinctively usually step back from the sort of the tilt brush open brush kind of aesthetic just because I've seen it so many times and it was really lovely to see something like really new and fresh using that technology yeah and it's it's sort of like a you go through and it feels like a little bit of a psychedelic music video right absolutely yes and and I'm pretty sure that he's a bit of a psychonaut. It might have been altered when he made it. For sure. All right, what's next? Yeah, so we also have another, I would say, gallery, but it's a, it is a gallery, but it's not a gallery where we're trying to just recreate a standard gallery space. So the piece is called Memory, and it's by Lara Nibiru. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing her name right, and I really apologise if I'm not. But it's this wonderful patchwork of sort of different pavilions showing her sort of analogue physical world art.

But it's done in this really crazy kind of collage. All these things are kind of smashed together. As you walking through you like walking through a fish there is a half head that has a gallery inside it and it really great because this is a artist who a few years ago discovered VRChat and decided to learn Blender and learn Unity but also had her kids learn it alongside her so that they could help with some of the more difficult parts of it and you know like if you were a completely professional world builder you could go in and say there's a uv that's not wrapped correctly here or something like that but it just adds to me that just adds to the joy of the experience there's someone that has really decided that this is the world that they want to make and they're just going to go ahead and get it done and get it out into the world and i really love that is it the world that had doors and the

artwork where it'd be like a pencil going into a house and coming out the other side is that that same one no that's a different one so this is the one that um when you begin you see a like a two headed doll sitting on the in the world as you jump in and is it like a very large and spatial kind of exploration okay yeah so it's kind of like a collage of like all this it feels like a little bit of like a meow wolf type of like really large scale worlds that you're going around and and also like a pieces of artwork that are displayed in almost like a gallery so yeah i had a lot of fun kind of exploring around and looking at the different art and it would be very infeasible to be able to actually build out the scale at which that some of these immersive artists are doing stuff and it's like one of these things that is very unique to VR and would probably never likely see the light of day because of how vast and huge some of these immersive art pieces are yeah and in fact in the speaking notes that she supplied for our tour guides that's exactly what she was saying is that in the ideal world that's how she would like to show her work in the real

world but it's entirely invisible yes kind of made for vr artists all right what's next so we also have a couple of gallery spaces that are dedicated to displaying 3d capture so either photogrammetry or gaussian splats so spatialography is by voxel kind and he's made this really beautiful gallery that has a mixture of different ways that you can see the splats that he's created. And in fact, he's actually built this entire pipeline that allows Gaussian splats to exist in VRChat. There are a number of limitations with VRChat and the Unity version that is being used. And so he has built this system to allow people to bring the splats onto the platform. So as you go through the gallery, there are moments where you see a traditional frame on the wall, but then as you approach it,

you realize that it's not a still picture, but it is actually a model behind, and you get that beautiful sort of parallax feeling. But then you walk around the corner, and the next frame is a large frame, and you can actually walk through that frame, and then you're inside the splat that they've taken. And one of the things that we're really excited about here is that he also shows some of his splats in objects so he has some globes and he has some cubes and you can pick them up and you can look at them and get super close to them and he has been working with a company called CRISPR AI has actually started producing physical splats so when you walk into the gallery on the right hand side there's a video playing and it shows some of those pieces and he's actually made some of those and sent them to us here in Venice so we have them available for people to look at and people are absolutely bowled over by how

beautiful they are but one of the things he's also done which is super clever is he's built a system to be able to capture splats of VR chat worlds so one of the pieces that we have which I'm very happy to be taking home and treasuring forever is a splat of our Venice immersive world with Voxelkai standing in the doorway. And it's like an incredibly beautiful memento. Yeah, and I had a chance to see this at Rain Dance. And the thing I love about this spatiography world is that he's really asking these deep philosophical questions of what does it mean to try to exhibit these Gaussian splats in a real artistic context. And so he's not only created a museum that helps to answer some of that, but also some of these core questions about what's it mean to capture a good splat in an artistic way, and how do you frame it, how do you contextualize it, and having ways to break through the fourth wall and actually jump into the splats. And so, yeah, I know there's some other approaches for looking at splats,

but I feel like that what Vox of Kai is doing here is really quite cutting edge and amazing in terms of just showing the potential of how some of these splats could be really seen as an art form. And I don't know if there's a whole culture in Japan that has really taken on splats, but certainly there's a subsection of VRChat creators from Japan who have been really pushing the edge in terms of how to exhibit and demonstrate what's possible with Gaussian splats. So it was really quite an inspiring piece. I highly recommend folks go check it out. Yeah, and the other one that we have is called Tokyo Grammetry Museum by Tokoyoshi. and that is a museum of the sort of spots that you would not necessarily see on a tour guide's map of Japan. He has created, using photogrammetry, recreations of lots of sort of childhood haunts. So there are lots of sort of play sets and playground materials. But one of the things that I really love about what he's been doing is that each one you can go up and you can press a button and what appears then is a set of cameras that then shows all of the different angles at which those photos were taking in order to build up those models.

so not only is it a museum where you're getting to see interesting content but there's a lot in there especially in the foyer which talks a lot about how the process works there's even a piece in there that sort of compares the difference between like photogrammetry and Gorsian splatting which is great and also because he got selected into the festival it was or translated it in English for the first time. Oh cool yeah I think when I saw it was still in Japanese. But the thing that I really appreciated about the Tokugrametry Museum approach was that you would see a decontextualized splat within the context of like an exhibit within the museum, but sometimes maybe a third of them you could push a button and you'd go into the original context and see these Gaussian splats. And it really felt quite transportive to be able to take a little guided tour through or more of like a world hop of what ends up being points of physical reality within the context of Japan. but it was just a really fun way to see different themes of, like,

here's a bunch of animal-based jungle gym play toys that are kind of all over Japan, and you kind of see a series of those, but also just a series of bridges and other places in nature. So I think it's a little bit different than what Voxel Kai is doing, which is a little bit more framed and, I guess, more of a museum kind of artistic, and this is more of a documenting of different places of interest of nature that are kind of decontextualized, and you can go in and be within the full context, which is super nice. Yeah, and then we also have another space, which is, again, it's playing with the idea of what a gallery is, which is Vertical Horizon 361 Degrees, which was made by the In Loco Gallery. And it shows a Tunisian calligraphy artist called Karim Jabiri's work. And his work is primarily with light art. So he uses like a light bar and then using like long exposure photography

creates these amazing pieces of calligraphy as a photo. But instead of just having a world with a bunch of photos on the wall, what they've done is they've created this really beautiful Arabic city city with this kind of haunting melody in the background and as you're walking through you have these sort of domed structures with eyes that are watching you you have this sort of golden path that you're following through the world and then every so often you're stopped by this beautiful piece of calligraphy and then there's a narration there's a piece of the artist speaking a little bit about giving you a bit of contextual about his work and his practice. But the nice thing is, is if you do go off the beaten track, there are hidden little galleries that are shown some of the work he does in the real world. And then what we did is the piece ends in Oasis, and the Oasis had a video player.

So I went onto YouTube and found a really great short, which showed him actually doing the practice and exactly how the practice is made and a little bit of context behind the artist. So we included that as part of the experience in Venice. Yeah, this was one of my favorite worlds just because it was so beautiful and poetic, but also kind of rare to see what is sort of a narrative-driven piece, but also very music-driven and a piece that's showing a lot of these really amazing pieces of art. and yeah in the in-local gallery I think it used to be in spatial and then I actually gave a lecture there at the beginning of the new immersive cycle and so it was kind of funny to be back in that same space and then kind of watch a documentary about the artist that it was based on so yeah just a really cool project yeah and actually that was a piece that I discovered at New Images I was a jury on their first virtual worlds competition and that was where I first came across that piece

and were really happy to have it in selection nice, alright, what's next? yeah, so the final gallery that's not a gallery piece is Town of Connection by Haruki Hari and again I'm very, very sorry if I'm pronouncing your name wrong so this Japanese artist has been with us for a few years now this is the third piece that we've shown and this is a Town of Connection so their work is sort of deceptively simple and usually follows a pattern of a framed picture on the wall that when you click it makes something somewhere else change. So you may have a picture of a banana and then when you click it, the picture next to it then has the banana flick through and under a bridge or something. And so each time the artist plays with the same mechanic, but each time they're getting more accomplished in the way they are executing it.

And so this time they've created essentially a town. So each of these artworks is in its own little building and all the buildings are then connected. And it's just a beautifully simple mechanic but every year it's really exciting to see what they do with it. I think the core experience of that for me was going into a building and then seeing how the setup was and then asking myself, okay, what's going to happen? You click, and then it's something that's slightly different, and it's novel and interesting, and you always have that surprise on every single little building you go into. It's like you think you know what's going to happen, but it's always going to be slightly different than what you expect, and it's just kind of a very delightful experience of just kind of constantly being stimulated. Yeah, absolutely. and so those are our sort of the heavy theme of the selection is the sort of the gallery spaces the other thing that I really love is the sort of the exploration worlds maybe it's an injustice to call them walking

simulators but places that you can go and just get completely lost in so one of those is by Carl Cronin Dean and Quantum Shift 287 and so that is a world called Veiled Dark. Now, Carl Cronin holds a very special place in my heart because it was his world, FFCR, that really changed my viewpoint on what VRChat world could be. I would come back to it almost on a weekly basis. It was just such a vast, beautiful, awe-inspiring place. They had shaders where when you move from one part of the world to another it changed the whole ambience of the world. And I would just take anyone that would listen to come. And so his work has developed over the years. Most recently, we also showed a piece called Tarried Precipice, which is actually probably one of my favorite VR chat worlds of all time.

And Veiled Dark is very much in that same sort of vein. So when we ask our world builders to supply us with information, We asked them for some things for tour guides to say as the tour guides are going around. So his information was just three friends who play Souls games and have fun building worlds in Unity. Yeah, it's a very kind of dark, gothic, themes of death and cemeteries, shipwrecks, kind of decay. Things are falling apart. but you get a sense of like this is a place that used to be very vibrant but now is just kind of a post-apocalyptic artifact. But so many little crevices to explore, you know, on cliffs and there's an ocean and then you have different scales and levels of going down trails down to the ocean side. And I had a lot of fun and actually spent quite a lot of time just like trying to discover each of the little crevices there. And, yeah, it's a really beautiful little world to explore around in.

a little bit dark about death and destruction and decay. It's called Veiled Dark. But there are some shimmering, like, little fabric-y glow, kind of surreal, magical realism things that are kind of weird in the background to kind of give it a little bit of flavor, that you're in some other kind of world that you don't quite understand. But, yeah, it's a beautiful place. I always thought that these works, they feel like you're being transported into some sort of dark Gothic painting. and like you I spend a lot of time in those worlds because I always have that deep sense of FOMO that there is something somewhere that I not found so one of the things that I have to do for Venice is I need to make the route plans for the tour guides And so whenever I get a world like that, I like comb every inch of it to make sure that I'm not missing something beautiful. Did you find a little hidden bedroom slash dining room on the ocean floor that's around the corner from one of the ships? I did indeed. Of course you did.

Yeah, but talking about getting lost, so we also have a piece called Liminal Nightmares by Lotus. So we had liminal pool rooms in the selection before, and this is liminal pool rooms' sort of slightly darker brother or sister. And so it starts in a sort of bedroom, and you're looking in the mirror and looking around thinking, I don't understand how to start this world. I was like, why was this selected in VR? I thought Mike didn't choose the VRChat world, and I looked around the corner and said, do you want arrows to help you find your way through the backroom's maze? I was like, backroom's maze, what? Oh, I guess I've got to flip through a wall. Yeah, so you're looking at this bed in front of you, and then you realize that there's an animal on the bed that isn't on the bed that you're in. oh hang on a minute, and just walk through the mirror, and then that is the start of this crazy journey.

And it's all based on these weird pool rooms, and it is so fun to get just completely lost. But one of the mechanics that's been brought into this version is that along the way there are artefacts that you can collect, and those artefacts then appear on your wall in the spawn room in the bedroom, And if you come back to the bedroom, you can then click on them and teleport to those spaces. So if you do get completely lost, you can always respawn and then anchor yourself in various parts of the map. And I can tell you, I got very, very, very lost in this one, but in a good way. But one of the things that's really lovely about the way that it works is that it's really eerie. and in order to find some of the spaces, you actually have to go into the pools and you have to swim right down to the bottom and you find that there's like a hidden piece of wall missing

and then you go through that and then suddenly you're on dry land and you're in this really beautiful space. So it just messes with all of the ideas of how to sort of navigate in the real world. yeah some of those faces in that are very cavernous and huge and i probably spent 45 minutes or an hour in there i don't think i've saw everything but i did at some point say i'm going to see if i can find my way back to the beginning and once i did then i was like okay i'm done this was amazing i really enjoyed that world though yeah and then we also have another world which is a sort of similar in its desire you know it is obviously very influenced by sort of dr morrow things which is like I Feel Small by Pee Wicks. And it has this really great sort of dark, ominous atmosphere, but it has these sort of neon tubes, which you can follow to try and find most of the spaces in the place. But one of the things that I really like about this

is that it has this weird juxtaposition between these sort of quite weird haunting spaces, but then there are also these Easter eggs dotted around the place where there are galleries of his cats. Was this a linear path, or was this an open world type of structure? I'm trying to remember this one. Well, so it's open. It's not as large as a... Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember now. You kind of have, in the beginning, it kind of goes up the stairs and stuff. That's right, that's right, that's right. And there's the weird, like, hairy obelisk that if you go inside, you fall down and end up on some sort of weird, like, spider chair. Yeah, I know. So, yeah, it definitely feels like one of those kind of Dr. Morrow-like places that, yeah, these worlds where you kind of, and it's similar to the liminal nightmares, you have a chance to wander and get a little lost, which I think we don't really have that much in these days. But to have the opportunity to kind of wander and get lost, it's nice to do that in these types of worlds.

Yeah, and it's also what I like to do in Venice. One of my favorite things to do is to just walk the streets and not have a particular direction and just go exploring these crazy streets. So it's quite nice to be able to do it in VRChat where surrealism and you don't have to worry about the laws of physics. Nice. What's up next? Yeah, so we don't very often select horror worlds for Venice. not for any particular reason other than a lot of VRChat horror worlds are usually focused on shock and awe. So they're full of, like, jump scares and, like, excessive gore or whatever, and that's not really our bag. But this year we have a really great world called Demon Hour Chapter 1, and that's by Jan Costa. And it's a really sort of esoteric world because it starts off in the guy's house. You're in his apartment.

And you can, like, click on various items dotted around his house. And you get this really funny, maybe slightly snarky commentary on all the various things that are dotted around his house. And then you get an idea of what this is going to be. You think that you're in this sort of slightly comedic space. And then you start on this kind of weird dream-like horror story that's full of, like, scary dogs and faces coming out of the ceiling and weird moments where the corridor kind of expands. Although with this one, I will have to absolutely confess that there is a kind of puzzle game in the middle of it where you are visiting a space and looking for anomalies. and this is one where I did have to go on YouTube and watch a playthrough in order to get through that piece. But it is absolutely worth doing

because the payoff at the end is fantastic. Oh, okay. I don't know if I made it all the way through. I just remember it being somewhat short. Shorter than something like The Devouring. Yes, and The Devouring is still an absolute classic. Yeah, that's how we met. We bonded. We spent a lot of time. Was it like eight hours or something? Yeah, seven or eight hours, yeah. That's quite a bonding experience. I love that. Yeah, totally. All right, what's up next? Yeah, so my obsession in life outside of VRChat is music. So I'm always looking for music experiences to show. And I personally am really into the replayable experiences, the ones that, you know, time zones are a pain. And if I'm getting older, I can't stay up to West Coast timelines to go to all of the clubs and things. But what I really love is when the experiences inject some story behind what they're doing

or really play with the whole sort of particle live and do some really crazy stuff. So this year we have a wonderful thing to realize by screaming color, or as I should really say, the Emmy-winning screaming color. because obviously the Thurman Collective and Metabrick and Scream and Culling and those guys have just won an Emmy for their work on Uncanny Alley. So huge shout-outs to them and congratulations on a momentous achievement, that is. Yeah, in this piece I got a chance to see A Wonderful Thing to Realize at Rain Dance. And I guess he wrote these musicals like a decade ago, kind of imagining a speculative future where he was living into his dreams. And so then he's now 10 years on living into his dreams and actually creating these amazing music, like spatial videos of these. And I think it was part of like a Santa Ria festival or something. They're not generally publicly available for most of the time, but super incredible and one of my favorite pieces this year.

And I think also starts to get into this biographical storytelling in a way that I found really quite moving and profound. Yeah, absolutely. It literally starts on a therapist's couch and is a really personal story about his own voyage of discovery and mental health. And sexuality. Absolutely. But all put to the sort of crazy, psychedelic, beautiful experiences that you would expect from our friend Carla. Yeah. Yeah, I really love that piece. and then um we also uh very lucky to have a good relationship with pk who does the break club experiences it's really hard to try and describe i've heard them described as the acid test of vr i would describe it as he does a lot of volumetric shaders that are augmenting your experience of the world in a way that is quite accelerated and trippy psychedelic and kind of

like an acid test back in the 60s. Yeah, absolutely. So there are kind of two elements to the way that he plays with his shows. So it's a 75-minute DJ set. So you have all the trippy shaders, and those things are amazing. You know, it is the closest thing to psychedelics without actually having to imbue a substance that I think I've ever been close to. And, in fact, we had people watching it during the selection here who ended up having to get slightly told off because they were spinning on their chair so much. They were so into it. They were just really going for it. But the other thing that's really lovely is the way that, with some of his shows, he plays with the nature of place. So you start off in a, I was going to say a traditional nightclub. It's not a traditional nightclub. It's super psychedelic and has like a massive fan in the floor. You're in the middle of a UFO or something. Yes. But it is appreciable that it is a nightclub.

But then it starts to rain, and then the nightclub disappears. And then you're taken on this mad journey where you go from, like, through tree houses. You have other spaces where you're in these sort of what looks like a coliseum. You're tiny in this world where there are, like, huge kitchen tables everywhere. So you just go on this really incredible journey, whilst also PK has a bunch of shader ninjas that he works with. And so those places become completely unreal all the way throughout, which is really exciting. Yeah, and even like little Q-Bert-type worlds with these little cubes with different contexts, and then it kind of ends in a really epic nature space that then you can sit there. And what I love about that world, I had seen it before when it premiered, but I actually watched the whole entirety of it again because I was just like reveling at seeing how you could be immersed in a virtual world, but just having these kind of augmented reality layer in VR filters

that are completely modulating your experience of the world, but also your mood and having different colors and how that shapes your emotions while you're watching it. So it's kind of subtle, but really I highly recommend, folks. It's replayable. You can go check it out. It's like 75 minutes. It's called Break 25, Cento Feliz. Absolutely. And then on the sort of the other side of that, from the sort of absolute trippy craziness, on the other side, we have another piece that was also in the San Roe Festival, which is called Not to Luca by Limer Palette. And that is a really beautiful experience. You start off in this cave and you have these sort of elemental glowing elements elements that sort of guide you through this beautiful cave and you end up in this sort of luscious forest and you meet the Japanese performer who's animated incredibly well and then it is essentially like it's a series of different scenes to the natural world you see this character

progress but it's set in this really beautiful natural space but with this absolutely incredible particle live show that just gets larger and larger and larger as the piece goes. It's a really beautiful piece. Yeah, I always love those types of particle effects. Yeah, just all the ways that people use shaders and particle effects to kind of add a layer of abstraction. I feel like things like Cosm and other, the sphere, or even like within the context of these spatial experiences, having like volumetric particles running through a space is something And it's still fairly unique to VR, and I think I really appreciate the volumetric shaders in that way. Yeah, absolutely. And it's absolutely the thing that pushes my buttons. All right, what's next? So we have three pieces in the selection this year by a world builder that I hadn't come across until this year's revision called Lavue. and they create these really beautiful spaces

who've created this incredible sky shader and makes these really wonderful animations. The piece that I really love is called Frozen Signal. So you land in this sort of desolate Arctic space with a research facility and the story is that mankind has long since been extinct but you find this sort of robot system that is looking after the space. And so it's a large sort of free-roam Arctic space. But when you go into these different research facilities, you'll find that there are little pieces that you can interact with, but they are not all benign. So at one moment you're pulling levers and you have these massive sort of what look like satellite dish, like radio telescope pieces. pieces and you have some fun sort of moving them around and they have just really beautiful sounds that make them all mechanical and these massive lasers fire out of these what you think are

satellite dishes and completely destroy this planet that has been hanging in the sky which is actually one of their other worlds you walk through to another research station you call the and like the weather change it's supposed to be a weather station but it kind of just sucks all of the color out of the world so yeah it just really really nice little interactions and a really beautiful space and all of all of their work is really accomplished and really well made Yeah when I went to that world one of the things I was thinking to myself was that man, some of these interactions that I'm just kind of getting for free, I don't have to earn them. They feel like this is what you'd have to play an entire video game to see, like, the ending. It's like this is the culmination of what you're building up to. But you just kind of watch the animatic. And the Fractured Winter was the first one of Larview's piece that I saw. It's very similar to the Celestium in the sense that there's this kaleidoscopic fractal-like shader on the sun.

And one's a winter world and another one's just kind of like, I just found myself kind of wandering around and hitting these different things to jump up or go to the top of the building and observe. And it's kind of on a loop where the animation stops, but I could respawn and still explore around the world. and it's just one of those really majestic shader-based worlds that have a lot of really interesting novelty happening, something that's unlike anything I've ever seen before, but really beautiful little particle effects to be little waypoint guides to help you navigate these little mini-worlds. They're not that big, but they're just big enough to be satisfying for 20 to 30 to 40-minute little explorations. Yeah, and one of our worlds, Ken, I saw your name on the credits. Why don't you tell us a bit about that? Yeah, so this is the Theobunny and Thrill, the Nicodothera mechanism, which I think is one of the first computers. But Thrill and Theobunny were building basically an astrological simulator where you can put in your birthday,

and it will create, from the Earth's perspective, all the different planets around you. So, yeah, Thrill was asking me what a thermos he should use, and I suggested he use the VSOP87, which is what he did and he implemented it and he got it to work so you can basically go in there and put in your birthday and it'll actually have a really accurate well not to like a super accurate to the degree but close enough for you to see from the perspective of earth all the different planets around the ecliptic and also they created this really beautiful coliseum world that had sort of gods they could go up and get a little message and leave a little wish so really beautiful little world that they created and yeah it was super cool to get a little bit of a sneak peek and to get some feedback along the way and what i really like about that is that you can also press a button and go up to the top of that coliseum and look down on the mechanism as it's working but then you can also bring up the sort of astrological star charts at the same time so yeah all the aspect lines you can see how they're connected so yeah they created a whole chart within

VR, so it's really cool. Yeah, really cool. We also have a couple of works by Tonton Demon, and they're very different worlds. So we have Blue Mayor, which is a piece about a dying planet, which is a really beautifully animated short-form narrative of this spatial happening. But on the other side of things, he also has a Dawn Beyond, which is a super chill boat ride, but incredibly well built. And you end up on this deserted island in this deserted house that you can go and explore. But it's just such a simple experience, but it's executed so beautifully that it's a really lovely place to sort of stop and chill and relax with people. Yeah, you don't usually have too many cozy hangout spaces, but that could be one.

The one that was the Blue Maya, I think it was with the adventure team, and they popped in. But yeah, it's a very cinematic kind of watching the stars from afar explode. And it was interesting to see some of these more cinematic, narrative-driven types of animations and pieces that people are kind of experimenting around of finding ways they can tell little mini spatial stories within VRChat. Yeah, absolutely. And it's lovely to see the platform evolve like that. And it's great to be able to show that sort of content here where we have lots of people from the industry who are still fairly new to the possibilities of what's happening on this really incredible platform. We also have A World of My Own by Tanu Alexia. So this is a really sweet world. You're walking through this beautiful old Victorian house with some nice jazz playing in the background and walking through thinking it's just a fairly standard experience.

And then when you walk out the door, you realize that you have been inside a doll's house and that actually you're on the table in someone's sewing room with this sort of giant sewing machine. And you just get this really beautiful sense of scale. And then you can hit a button outside so that when you go back in, the front of the doll's house is then missing. And again, it's a super simple yet effective concept. And this is also one of the reasons why I really love working with Liz and Michelle, because this is beautiful because of its simplicity, and they really see that, and they want to celebrate lots of the different types of work that is shown on the platform, not just these sort of big cinematic narrative-based projects. Yeah, it's a very short and simple idea, but it's kind of like a short film, and maybe like some of these are really epic worlds that you can spend hours in

and some of these are just a few minutes. So it's like kind of a quick idea, simply and efficiently executed. And yeah, you kind of get a point. And then it's nice to have like a little short piece when you have other longer pieces when you want to see multiple world hops. Yeah, and also I talk about this constantly, but to me, VRChat is like the YouTube of VR, right? And so the whole idea of the nature of what content is, changes, when you have a platform that is designed around people exploring and going world hopping and finding things. There are lots of these experiences that couldn't exist as an app in the Metastore. They wouldn't stand up as a paid-for, stand-alone experience, but this is just a piece of art that someone wanted to make. So we have another piece called Half Empty by Yuri TS, which is again, it's like a super simple room it is a bunch of science equipment sitting on the desk yet when you open the vials

they just explode with these beautifully animated particle systems of leaves and blossom, but then as you walk through the space, you disperse those particles, so your movement in the space is then creating these beautiful kaleidoscopic artworks out of all these particles. And so, again, like a beautifully simple experience, but something that would never exist if it wasn't for a platform like VRChat. Yeah, you're kind of like walking through, and it's a little bit like a fluid dynamics simulator, but with these different particles. Absolutely, absolutely. And then another piece that we have in the selection is Specularium by Jasper, Jasper, which is fantastic because he's actually here at the festival, has been enjoying going around doing some of the experiences. But it's this really great sort of thought-provoking journey. You have a bunch of like really weird, unsettling environments, lots that are sort of focused on sort of surveillance culture.

there's things like you're walking past this giant eye that is constantly following you or walking through a space and sort of helicopters above you that are filming everything that you do and you you see you and your friends walking through this space and sort of being followed and targeted it's a really sort of dystopian piece but i really love it it's really strong yeah it sort of uh ends on the jeremy bentham's what's the name of the thing with the surveillance And it's a, I forget the name of it, but it's a really famous prison where everybody's looking at each other. It's kind of like a piece that sort of, in a way, uses surveillance in an artistic way, but also commenting on it. So as you're walking around, you can see yourself in the cameras and different scenes. And yeah, I think it's a fairly short, linear journey, but really quite enjoyed it. Absolutely. And then we have Volare by Juice. so this is an experience where you get to physically fly

so you can literally put your arms out and flap your wings and he's built all these beautiful floating islands which you have to navigate through and the idea is that you go and find all of these collectibles along the way although if you don't want to flap your arms then there are sort of hidden rocket packs that allow you to explore the space. But again, it's one of these things which is beautiful about VR. It's one of these things that you could never do in real life, and you get this real sense of exploration and discovery, which is fantastic. Yeah, I definitely picked up the jetpacks, and that was a lot easier to get around, but I did not complete all of the different tokens. I got some of them, but I thought, okay, I got the point a little bit. that's a lot of vast world, and it wasn't that easy to control the jetpack. So it was fun to zoom around a little bit to kind of see the mechanic. And again, unique kind of locomotion mechanic that Juice has in this piece of Valera.

And then there's Come Home. Yes, so Come Home by Aruz is a narrative-based experience where you're trying to find your way through a maze. So as you're walking through, you find these text messages from this unknown entity, which is sort of provocating you to keep going and find your way. And the maze gets sort of more and more trippy and slightly difficult to follow. You find that there are entrances that you try to walk down, suddenly get shut off and you're sent the next way. And the idea is that you're slowly by slowly trying to get to this really beautiful home space, which is at the center of this labyrinth. Yeah, it's nice to see, like, again, walking through a spatial context but having a little bit of narrative bits along the way in terms of a story that's being delivered to you and reflecting on different things throughout the course of going through this little maze world. So, yeah, it's a piece that, again, I guess,

pointing to some of these, starting to integrate more and more narrative elements into some of these worlds. So I think we did it. We covered all of them, right? I think so. Yes, we did. All right. So I guess finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of all this sort of immersive storytelling and spatial computing and world building might be? And what it might be able to enable? Well, I always struggle with this question. I think one of the experiences that I had fairly recently in the real world, which really opened my eyes to immersive storytelling in a medium that I wasn't that close to, was a festival called Boomtown. And it is a 70,000 capacity music festival, primarily a music festival, but layered over the top of it is what is essentially a LARP with maybe 2,000 live actors all playing characters and many different storylines all running throughout Boomtown City with this overarching narrative which goes on from year to year to year.

And that's really opened my eyes to the idea of what these experiences in these spaces could be. The Ferryman Collective are doing a lot with real actors and having those sort of immersive experiences where the actors are having to live and breathe their role, but also deal with the audience with them, the questions that they have. So I think this is something really interesting about these sort of larger form immersive theater style experiences which continue and go on. Awesome. Is there anything else that's left inside you'd like to say about our immersive community? I'm just going to say the thing that I say every time, which is I am always world hunting. I'm always looking for interesting work. so on Blue Sky I am manglebird as I am in VR chat I am always looking for interesting work so please reach out if there's something you think you would like to show at the festival

Awesome, well Mike thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to give a little bit of a tour through all the different VR chat worlds this year from like 800 to 25 or 26 or whatever it was and that we just really strong selection this year like I said there's like lots of interesting music worlds art worlds of one horror world, and then we've got some interesting narrative worlds, more like little experimental narratives and short films, long films, epic journeys, and a wide range of different types of styles. It's like a really great cross-section of what's happening in the immersive space in VRChat. So I always love to see what this lecture ends up being because it's nice to just check in to the best of what's happening here in VRChat. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast, for bringing it all down, and for spending all this time curating and dedicating yourself to serving and shouting the best of what's happening in VR chat. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast. Thank you very much. I'll see you here next year. Awesome. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning

I want to give away all this information for free, make it publicly accessible for not only you, but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. You know, I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1,000 true fans. And if I have just $5 a month from that 1,000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.