CURRENTS is a stunning debut from Jake Oleson as it pushes the grammar of 180 filmmaking to new heights. Oleson comes from the world of advertising and music videos, and he went through a rigorous pre-production process where he had actually already edited the entire piece before shooting any production footage by using still stereoscopic test photos and videos. The insights from this pre-production animatic are evident, as there are some of the most stylized movements I’ve seen, and he managed to not trigger any of the common motion sickness triggers. There are some really powerful cuts that seamlessly juxtapose different environmental contexts for dramatic effect.



CURRENTS tells the story of a young woman who leaves her Vietnam rural countryside home to the city seeking more economic opportunity. Aside from a short exchange with her mother at the beginning, the rest of the entire story is told through spatial storytelling, driving electronic music that was also composed by Oleson, and a shader-filled point-cloud scene with some animated motion capture. It's really quite a beautiful piece that gave me a glimpse of the next phase of cinematic immersive filmmaking.



It's also worth mentioning CURRENTS in the context of other musical experiences since Oleson is both a musician who has a background in music video production. The music was specifically composed to serve the narrative in this instance, but it will be interesting to see more and more immersive music videos start to crop up now that the Apple Immersive video format is starting to get licensed out to folks like Vimeo, who commissioned this piece.



Apple's push for 180-degree immersive video has brought up some broader discussions about the merits and downsides to 360-degree films. From a creator's point of view, 180-degree filmmaking is a lot easier to do logistically as it is closer to existing production pipelines, which is brilliantly demonstrated in CURRENTS.



It's also worth noting that CURRENTS has a point-cloud scene that shows up in the middle of their cinematic 180-degree immersive video that represents a key turning point in the story and journey of the main protagonist. There's also some really poetic shaders that are translating the static scenes into even more of a dynamic visual representation of the business and chaos of the city. It has quite a narrative impact when juxtaposed against the photorealistic footage and custom-written and driving musical score.



Even though the Apple Vision Pro has been out for over a year now, SXSW is still an opportunity for folks to check out the Apple Vision Pro for the first time. It was probably easiest to check out on CURRENTS who had six different headsets and was using the Sandwich Vision Theater app in Kiosk mode to seamlessly jump into the experience bypassing the time-consuming eye tracking calibration step.



I was also particularly interested in Olson's production pipeline, the camera gear and kit costing less than $5k (Canon EOS R5 Camera Body, RF5.2mm F2.8 L Dual Fisheye, & DJI Ronin-SC Gimbal Stabilizer), Topaz Video AI Enhancer upscaling tools to go from 8k to 16k, and all of the due diligence that he did to understand and mitigate motion sickness triggers. The end result feels like a music video that tells a timeless story of the tension between rural and urban homes and what is lost in the pursuit of career opportunities.



Below are links to of all of my SXSW 2025 coverage by the Voices of VR podcast. And be sure to check out this Linked article: Recap of All SXSW XR Experiences Including Voices of VR Podcast Interviews with Every Artist.



SXSW XR Experience Competition




[Overview of all of the SXSW 2025 XR Experience Program] - #1529: SXSW 2025 XR Experience S...

OTO'S PLANET was being exhibited on the Quest at SXSW, but I had a chance to check out the Apple Pro Version ahead of the SXSW festival and I felt like I much preferred it. OTO'S PLANET picked up the second place prize at Venice Immersive, but I missed being able to interview the director Gwenael Francois there.



I did manage to catch up with Francois at SXSW to talk more about the development of this beautiful interactive narrative that uses table top-scale animation, and requires the user to rotate a tiny planet around in order to follow the story of Oto, his pet, and the story of a colonizing intruder who arrives.



I found that the interactions were much smoother and immersive on the Apple Vision Pro than the Quest, and the higher resolution also popped a lot more. The Apple Vision Pro version defaults to mixed reality while there is an opportunity to see it in fully immersive VR on the Quest. I normally would prefer the Quest version, but having the better quality mixed reality cameras and overall much higher resolution in the Apple Vision Pro.



Apple also featured Oto's Planet, and DPT CEO Nicholas Roy shares in this interview that they've actually received more purchases on Apple devices than Meta's ecosystem. Meta’s storefront has been flooded by Meta's own first-party Horizon world as well as App Lab apps, and so it’s very telling and reflective of the current state of distribution to have more sales for the Apple Vision Pro than Meta Quest.



It is promising to see Apple get more serious at immersive storytelling as there was a session titled "Create Interactive Stories for Apple Vision Pro" on Tuesday morning featuring three representatives from Apple.







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Another Apple Vision Pro piece at SXSW 2025 was COSMOS IN FOCUS by Atlantic Studios (recently rebranded from Atlantic Productions). This was a short and sweet educational experience that allowed you to explore the imagery of the James Webb telescope, but it's both spatially contextualized in the night sky planetarium style. It is also fused together with other deep space satellite images at different scales of resolution creating this really cool zoom effect that's like a mash-up of the film POWERS OF TEN with Google Maps tiles, but in the context of space imagery. It's also an experience that demonstrates the power of collaborating with scientific researchers and subject matter experts as they're able to translate contextless 2D jpgs into an incredibly powerful immersive experience that not only preserves the original context, but leverages the immersive medium to provide many more learning opportunities. Many immersive stories on the festival circuit will shy away from more explicit didactic content or learning experiences, but this piece leans into it by reducing the choices a user can make streamlining the user journey. I also really enjoyed my conversation with Aditi Rajagopal, who led this project after transitioning from R&D and AR storytelling at Meta to immersive storytelling at Atlantic Studios.







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There was an projection-based immersive experience called ORIGINS - LIFE'S EPIC JOURNEY that was originally formatted for a digital art museum in Germany called Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, but it was translated into a three-channel video installation that was showing in a small conference room at SXSW. I only saw the video version at SXSW, and so I have not experienced the piece within its originally-intended, fully-immersive context. But it's collaboration between digital artists Markos Kay, Martin Salfity, Thomas Vanz, Davy Evans, Gokhan Tekin, Susi Sie, Teun van der Zalm and Roman Hill to tell the story of the evolution of life from the smallest quantum to biological to galactic scales, each using different visual techniques to create these 25 different chapters. I had a chance to chat with Paolo Loeffler to get a bit more context on the evolution of Kunstkraftwerk Leipzig, and how ORIGINS was developed and commissioned to play in these projection-based immersive exhibition spaces.







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FLY TO YOU tells the story of Kang Songjeol who was separated from her childhood friends in the aftermath of the 1950 split between North and South Korea. Oral history interviews were captured in 360 video, and her childhood memories were recreated with point scans derived from Leici BLK360 LiDAR scans combined with Azure Kinect volumetric captures. The experience manages to virtually fly over the restricted demilitarized zone into North Korea, which is something that is illegal from them to do physically but serves as a symbolic gesture towards reunification. There are still thousands of families hoping for an opportunity to be reunited, and there's a beautiful spatial memorial that brings home that point at the end of this piece. I had a chance to unpack it all with co-directors Sngmoon Lee and Youngyun Song







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SYMPHONI is a brand new hand-tracked rhythm game that was inspired by the mechanics of conducting a symphony. It was directed by Ingram Mao and developed by a number of undergrads and graduates of the USC Games program. This game also goes from mixed reality into fully immersive VR as you progress through each of the stages, but it's a really fresh take within the rhythm game genre as I found myself playing for over an hour on my first playthroughs. Mao comes from an interior design and architecture background, but also thinks very deeply about the game mechanics and innumerable tradeoffs to be navigated through the game design process, and so it was a real pleasure to have a chance to dig into the weeds of the process of developing this experience.







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ECHOVISION is the latest experience from multi-disciplinary artist Jiabao Li that has three major parts. The first part is a mobile-phone based mixed reality experience that does a metaphoric translation of echolocation by using LiDAR to detect your immediate physical surroundings, and then reveals it with a rippling shader that is voice activated. The second part is a video that poetically visualizes different bat calls that have been identified by AI into different contextual domains, and there's a really awesome haptic couch experience that goes along with it. The last part is a field trip to the Congress Street bridge to watch the emergence of hundreds of thousands of bats come out at night as they go to eat. I caught up Li to hear more about all of her interdisciplinary and interspecies collaborations on this piece.







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There were a number of pieces at SXSW that were centered around embodied interactions including HONEY FUNGUS, which is a series of interactive embodied experiments telling a broader story of cultivating intimacy with ecology. This piece leans more into embodied dream logic rather than clearly articulating a narrative journey, and I had a fascinating conversation with Johan King who decoded the underlying symbolism. King’s first step of his creative process was to go down a rabbit hole researching queer ecology and the latest research on fungi, and he wrote an essay titled "Unfathomable Intimacies" that lays out his original inspirations. One thing that really stuck with me from the experience was this intriguing AI mash-up of Smithsonian Field Research and amateur erotica designed in order to cultivate a new form of ecological intimacy with the world around us. I appreciated this experience a lot more after having a chance to learn more about additional context provided on the website as well as insights gained from my conversation with King. To me the dream logic in this piece leans a little bit more into personal symbols that need some decoding rather than more universal archetypes that are easier to project the intended meaning upon. But I always love learning more about Fungi since they represent so many paradigm-shattering insights.







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1906 ATLANTA RACE MASSACRE is a phone-based AR experience directed by Nonny de la Peña that digs into the forgotten history of the violent attacks on the black community by white mobs incited by race-baiting politicians and newspapers. The arc of the story is told through the lens of black journalist Max Barber, who was chronicling the events as they were unfolding. We see a series of volumetrically captured monologues by Barber (played by actor Bryonn Bain). As the massacre unfolds, we travel to different key locations around Atlanta represented by spatial facades and Quill illustrations. There's also a series of 2D AI animations from ranging from white politicians in newspapers to black activists who are in picture frames. I spoke with de la Peña around some of the constraints and limitations of working with mobile phones that are not completely optimized for XR experiences like this just yet, but it's much more accessible form factor that the executive producer of the National Center for Civil and Human Rights is interested getting into schools.







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THE CHOICE returns to SXSW with the latest Chapters 2 and 3, and continues to capture intimate testimonials of women and couples who make the choice to abort their pregnancies. Chapters 1 and 2 take place in Texas where abortion is now nearly totally banned in all but a few situations. The legal specificity of these exceptions is ambiguous enough that doctors often avoid providing reproductive health care for abortions because they're afraid of being prosecuted or losing their license. This means that it is legal for doctors to lie to patients, which is what happens in Chapter 1 causing the protagonist to nearly die. Chapter 2 features a pregnancy clinic that turned out to be run by an anti-abortion religious group who tried to pressure her to not have an abortion. And Chapter 3 features an older Canadian couple who started to have some doubts, but ultimately decided to not carry the pregnancy to term. THE CHOICE features some really stereoscopic video effects combined with depth information to create a really realistic face-to-face conversation. As the viewer, you have the ability to subtly guide the conversation by choosing which questions to ask. But overall, it's a really powerful example of how these types of simulated conversations creates an engaged way for people to hear the details of someone's situation where they may actually change their opinion about abortion. Joanne Popinska and Tom C. Hall tell me that they have experienced being able to change minds with their first chapter, and they're looking forward to continuing to spread the word with their 2nd and 3rd chapters that premiered at SXSW.







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WAYS OF KNOWING: A NAVAJO NUCLEAR HISTORY tells the story of the impact of uranium mining on the Navajo community. This film is a unique collaboration between a Navajo storyteller Sunny Dooley and nuclear nonproliferation expert Lovely Umayam where the story of US nuclear history is told through an indigenous lens. This means telling the story of how nuclear policy has impacted Navajo land, but also on the intergenerational impact on the Navajo people. The fully immersive quality of 360 video allows Dooley to preserve the full context of how she would tell the story to her community. This was my favorite interview from SXSW 2025 as it is another great example of how the immersive quality of VR is able to capture and transmit indigenous ways of knowing, and how this indigenous perspective is also changing how nuclear nonproliferation experts are thinking about these nuclear policy issues. This film would also not be able to be told the same way if it was only 180 degrees, and it is a prescient example of the affordances of VR to be able to tell the story of a place with its full relational context.







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SHELTER is a 360 video documentary telling the story of civilians in Ukraine seeking protection in bomb shelters. The film poetically transports you the many different ways Ukrainians are sheltering from small cramped basements to parking garages to hospitals. It also contrasts these underground spaces to the aftermath of war from bombed out buildings to funerals for Ukrainian soldiers. The experience always documents how the dream lives of Ukrainians are impacted by the war as they also overlay these dream sequences over billboarded videos of drone strikes. Overall, it's a meditative and powerful journey of cinéma vérité, observational durational takes that are juxtaposed together to tell a much larger story of the human impact of war. . Check out my deep dive with director Sjors Swierstra and producer Justin Karten for more insights in how they put this piece together.



Apple's push for 180-degree immersive video has brought up some broader discussions about the merits and downsides to 360-degree films. From a creator's point of view, 180-degree filmmaking is a lot easier to do logistically as it is closer to existing production pipelines, which is brilliantly demonstrated in CURRENTS. The main downside is that it is difficult to control where people are looking, but the main benefit is that you're able to preserve the full context of a place. SHELTER was one of two films that really leaned into being able to be fully transported to a place without having to worry about selecting a constrained frame or point of focus. 







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TRACES: THE GRIEF PROCESSOR is a multi-user interactive VR experience where four people are invited to poetically explore and learn more about their grief. Created by documentary filmmaker Vali Fugulin, it features didactic conversations about grief with ritualist Stéphane Crête who leans upon Francis Weller's Five Gates of Grief. Fugulin resists describing her piece as a grief ritual with any therapeutic intent, and she sees it more as a catalyst for thinking about or having conversations about your grief rather than facilitating deep emotional catharsis.



The experience takes you through a series of different interactive exercises where you play with different externalized, symbolic, spatial representations of your grief. The experience culminates with an asynchronous sharing of your story of grief based upon a minute-long audio recording that you're asked to record while looking at an image representing your grief you're asked to upload before the experience begins.



There were a number of aspects about this experience that did not quite work for me, and it’s hard to know if it’s due to my own peculiarities of VR-induced social anxiety or if there could be changes in flow of the recording and decisions around consent. I’d prefer to see examples of other recordings before being asked to record anything, and I’d also prefer to make decisions on whether I’d like to share my recording with others in the moment after having a chance to record (and possibly re-record) something. These privacy decisions were put up front without the full context of how something you might do in an experience might be shared, and with no options to change your mind later. This meant that I regretted my decision, and there was no way to stop my failed recording from being shared with others in the experience. I did have the opportunity to retract my data at the end, but I would have preferred to be able to make that decision in the moment. Again, this could come down to my unique position of having a really recognizable voice within a small community.



I do believe that there are a lot of great opportunities for developing new types of grief rituals within social VR spaces, but at the same time there are still a lot of missing body language cues that can open doors for some and close doors for others. 







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There were a number of projects exploring social dynamics within immersive pieces, including the special jury prize winner for the XR competition PROOF AS IF PROOF WERE NEEDED. This was a projection-based video project that featured video feeds from four different rooms in a home where a couple is searching for different objects. There are five audience members who are walking between rooms represented by a top-down blueprint of the home, and there's a computer vision system that's detecting where the most people are located and then showing the feed from that room. There are six speakers providing an ongoing Foley-based spatial audio narrative of sounds coming from different locations giving the audience a clue as to where they should investigate to puzzle together the cryptic narrative. The core mechanics felt SLEEP NO MORE-inspired where you move between different rooms to see different threads of a multi-threaded story, and you use your body to edit the experience. But instead of a single POV, it's abstracted into a collective social experiment where you have to collaborate with four other people in order to vote on what room video feed to watch. In the end, there's a lot of the story that remained a complete mystery to me until I had the symbolic dream logic decoded in my interview with co-director Ting Tong Chang and Blast Theory representative Anne Rupert. Here's the jury statement about this piece, "Spoiler Alert! The Special Jury Award Winner made us feel lost, frustrated and disconnected from each other. What started as a slow burn, turned into an unexpected connection and dance between space, story, technology and human behavior."







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The final AI-related piece this year was THE LAST PRACTICE, which I unfortunately have not had a chance to see yet because there were a number of technical glitches that prevented me from seeing it on site. I did however have a chance to remotely catch up with director Phil McCarty to talk more about the story and mechanics of the experience. Part of the synopsis says, "In a world beset with algorithmic careers and generative push-button-creativity in the name of "AI", what is the role of art, and inspiration any more?" After a number of monologues from virtual band members, then you are asked to create a mash-up song from different genres by choosing different album covers. McCarty may be making some critical reflections on AI within his story, but he's also simultaneously a big user of AI tools to facilitate his own creative process in producing this piece. We talk about this paradox in our conversation, but also his journey into the XR industry as a writer, musician, filmmaker, and as a writer on WHAT IF…? – AN IMMERSIVE STORY (previously covered in episodes #1391 & #1437).







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Another AI-based project at SXSW this year was SWEET! by Dutch designer and artist René van Engelenburg of DROPSTUFF MEDIA. This is a projection-mapped physical installation designed to facilitate a very brief conversation with an OpenAI LLM-driven virtual being about the parallels between how sugar is added to all of our food and how AI is currently being added to all of our technologies. The virtual being uses a sort of Socratic method of questioning to solicit your opinion in four leading questions that are making an argument about the commonalities between sugar and AI. It's a short five-minute experience, and so I did the piece three different times to understand the underlying mechanics of how it's built. It never felt like a true conversation as there's a superficial acknowledgement of my responses, but always immediately progresses onto the pre-set monologue that is pre-written within the series of prompts without having what I see seemingly impact the substance of the conversation beyond some prompted images that are projected onto the white set of a candy store. So instead of a truly, open-ended Socratic dialogue, this experience feels more like a Socratic monologue where questions are only driving a superficial sentiment analysis before moving onto the delivery of the next random fact or story beat. We still have a long way to go before these LLM-based experiences can balance a convincing conversation while also telling a compelling story, but this feels like the type of XR immersive installation providing a holographic embodiment of the virtual being is a compelling form factor that I can see being further developed in the future.







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Curating archives was a theme that I also explored in a conversation wtih Tamara Shogaolu about her piece ORYZA: HEALING GROUND that premiered at DocLab 2024. She was at SXSW showing the interactive AR story game ANOUSCHKA exploring the memories of her grandmother through various cultural artifacts (see Shogaolu interview with her about ANOUSCHKA from its world premiere at DocLab 2023). ORYZA wasn't showing at SXSW, but I had a chance to catch up with Shogaolu to unpack how she's working with archives to document cultural artifacts enslaved people, and then expand it into speculative art with a consistent aesthetic using a custom-built AI system that is centered on Black histories. Shogaolu details her experiences of instances where large-language model AI systems have erased Black people, and how she's had to hack existing AI systems in order to get the outputs she wants. But she’s also training entirely new models using materials from archives that are not included within existing models. We explore the paradox of desiring cultural representation in these AI systems while also avoiding the negative side effects of extractive cultural appropriation, and this new trend of training custom AI models as a form of artistic expression leading of future dreaming to unique mash-up of speculative futures and historical archives.







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The SXSW XR Competition jury prize winner REFLECTIONS OF LITTLE RED DOT had some really innovative mixed reality integrations, and was also a part of a new trend of cultivating an archive of material as an artistic practice. This piece by director Chloé Lee featured about 3 hours of documentary interview footage shot in Singapore starting in 2015 exploring a variety of different themes. Originally started with the intent to create a documentary to learn more about her mother's homeland, Lee turned to mixed reality to create sets of themes featuring looping clips from interviews she conducted to tell the story of Singapore. The experience creates a sense of wandering that you get when exploring a new place, and allows you to dip in and out of different flows of thought. You can navigate these different themes by placing a physical photo slide into a retro slide projector that only takes one slide at a time. Once you pop it in, then you immediately see a mixed reality light creating a holographic Singaporean table where you can sit down and navigate 5-6 different clips. It's one of the more compelling uses of mixed reality I've seen that creates a holographic illusion that you use your body to edit between these different interview clips. The jury statement reads, "Deceptively humble and delightful, this open-world documentary invites us to freely explore a country in transition. Guided by a daring new talent in XR storytelling, it confronts us with the vulnerability of everyday life, evoking a universal sense of place."







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THE SECRET LIFE OF MONSTERS: THE GATEWAY EXPERIENCE is a mixed reality puzzle game created by Wallrus Creative Technologies as an immersive demo in order to feature the unique tracking technology they've created in order to better facilitate LBE mixed reality experiences on the Quest. They built a tracking system hidden within their custom tiling in order to have all of the Quest HMDs know where true north is located, and avoiding some of the more annoying and time-consuming calibration steps involved with mixed reality experiences. The experience itself featured a seamless transition between floating mixed portals and immersive worlds where you have to find and scan corrupting monsters in the parallel realities. I get the full story of how the project developed from Emile Arragon and JP Desjardins, and it's interesting to note that Arragon is really sensitive to motion sickness from virtual locomotion in VR, but mixed reality experiences where you only move when your body moves are a lot more comfortable for him. At the end of the day, this piece does feel a bit more like a tech demo than full-on game or fully fleshed out story or world, but it serves the purpose of demonstrating their elegant solution to a MR calibration and orientation solution that could open up a number of new mixed reality experiences within different LBE contexts.







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Andrew Schneider’s "NOWISWHENWEARE (the stars)" absolutely blew me away, and it was a story-driven, immersive art exhibit at the University of Texas Performing Arts Center that opened at the end of SXSW. It uses a cube of 4000 LED lights in a dark theater space to create a visual spectacle, but also to hide an incredible magic trick. There was an array of 392 speakers hidden on three different walls creating one of the most complex and nuanced spatial audio storytelling experiences that I've ever heard. I was profoundly moved by the themes of grief, loss, and our place in the cosmos as he uses the low-bit visual experience to amplify the richness of the audio storytelling featuring beautiful biomimicry moments, large movements of abstract shapes, as well as allusions to stars and constellations. It's an experience that transcends my ability to fully communicate how incredible it was, but I did have a chance to have an in-depth chat with Schneider to talk about his journey in creating it. From theatre-maker to NYU ITP, Schneider does a brilliant job of mashing up data inputs with novel outputs, but all serving the larger journey he's taking us on as a master storyteller.







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