Empire at Sea leaves Venice Immersive on the festival’s closing day with a format that is hard to ship and harder to forget: up to ten people in Apple Vision Pro, standing around a custom LED table, watching volumetrically captured actors appear in passthrough while the room decides what happens next.
Venice Immersive 2026 wraps today, September 12, after ten days on Lazzaretto Vecchio. Peter Flaherty’s 22-minute competition entry — billed as a solarpunk AR drama — was one of the pieces critics flagged for visual craft rather than novelty. The Film Verdict called it the experience most likely to enjoy a long shelf life for its “visually innovative nature,” describing hologram-like scenes on the table and overlapping subplots that reward walking the perimeter.
Ten headsets. One table. A branching oil-rig drama.
The setup is public and consistent across the Biennale listing, UploadVR, and Lincoln Center’s season page. Participants wear Vision Pro. Passthrough mixed reality places volumetrically captured performers into the physical scene around a purpose-built LED table. Viewers can move, change sightlines, and push participatory choices that branch the narrative.
The plot follows climate scientists who relocate to a remote oil rig to prototype a sustainable community at sea. A catastrophic event cuts them off from the mainland. Five years later, a young woman named Lani spots a boat on the horizon — the first contact since the disaster — and the group must decide whether to welcome the strangers or keep them out by force. The Biennale Cinema page lists a 22-minute runtime, English language, and a USA production credit for Flaherty Pictures with 4DV.ai and NightLight Labs.
Cast, capture, and who paid for it
The billed cast includes Orlando Jones, Ayelet Zurer, Geoffrey Arend, Beth Grant, Imani Jade Powers, and Mary Chieffo, among others named on the Biennale sheet. Actors were volumetrically captured; coverage points to technology from 4DV.ai. Flaherty’s prior credits include the Sundance AR/projection piece The Dial (2019) and creative direction on Marvel/Disney’s Eternals AR project (2021).
Commissioning sits with Lincoln Center and ASU Gammage. That is the institutional bet underneath the headset demo: climate communication that is supposed to feel urgent rather than abstract, using solarpunk optimism and concrete details (insect protein, water reclamation, offshore renewables) that Flaherty’s creator statement spells out on the Biennale page.
Venice was the premiere. New York is on the calendar.
UploadVR reported that home versions for VR headsets and mobile phones are planned, without platform or ship dates. What is dated: Lincoln Center lists the North American presentation for January 13–17 and January 19–24, 2027 at the Kenneth C. Griffin Sidewalk Studio in David Geffen Hall, with an approximate 30-minute runtime on its event page — longer than Venice’s 22-minute competition cut, which suggests a venue-tuned edit rather than a simple remount.
That scarcity is the story as much as the plot. A branching volumetric drama for ten simultaneous Vision Pro wearers does not scale like a Quest Store release. It scales like theater: commissions, islands, Sidewalk Studios. On the day Venice Immersive closes, Empire at Sea is the clearest reminder that some of the most ambitious spatial work is still leaving the lagoon as a touring installation — not as an App Store icon.
Sources: Biennale Cinema — Empire at Sea; UploadVR; The Film Verdict; Lincoln Center — Empire at Sea.
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