Venice Immersive opens September 2 with a shared Vision Pro drama: ten people around an LED table, volumetric actors in passthrough, and a branching solarpunk plot headed for Lincoln Center next.
UploadVR reports that Empire At Sea, a 22-minute interactive mixed-reality drama from director Peter Flaherty, is premiering in competition at Venice Immersive this week. The XR section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs September 2–12, 2026. The official La Biennale listing frames the piece as a “Solarpunk AR drama” about climate scientists stranded on an oil-rig colony after the mainland is wiped out.
Shared table, branching narrative
UploadVR’s description is specific: up to ten participants wear Vision Pro headsets around a custom LED table. Passthrough mixed reality drops volumetrically captured performers into the room. Viewers can walk the table, change vantage points, and steer a branching story. Capture tech comes from 4DV.ai; production partners listed by La Biennale include Flaherty Pictures and NightLight Labs.
The cast is not a typical XR demo roster. UploadVR and the Biennale page name Orlando Jones, Ayelet Zurer, Geoffrey Arend, Beth Grant, Imani Jade Powers, and Mary Chieffo among others. Flaherty previously directed the Sundance AR/projection piece The Dial (2019) and served as creative director on Marvel/Disney’s Eternals AR project in 2021.
Plot and why Venice matters
La Biennale’s synopsis: climate scientists spend a summer on a remote rig trying to prototype a sustainable city at sea. Midway through, a catastrophe cuts them off from the mainland. The interactive arc jumps five years later, when a young woman named Lani sees a boat on the horizon—the first outside contact since the disaster—and the community has to decide whether to welcome strangers or keep them out. Themes flagged in the official notes include sustainability, immigration, and multicultural community, plus concrete climate-tech beats (insect protein, water reclamation, offshore renewables).
Commissioning credit goes to Lincoln Center and ASU Gammage. Venice is the competition premiere, not the end of the road: UploadVR says a Lincoln Center run is scheduled for January 2027, with press notes promising later VR-headset and mobile versions for at-home audiences. Platforms and dates for those home editions are still unannounced.
What to watch after the festival
For the XR beat, Empire At Sea is less about another Quest store drop and more about whether shared volumetric AR can travel beyond festival rooms. Ten headsets around one table is a hard install. If Lincoln Center and the promised headset/mobile cuts land cleanly, it becomes a useful stress test for “installation first, consumer second” immersive drama—especially as social VR platforms keep contracting and glasses/passthrough formats keep absorbing the narrative energy.
Sources: UploadVR — Empire At Sea at Venice Immersive; La Biennale di Venezia — Empire at Sea; Venice Immersive 2026 selection announcement; ASU Gammage — Empire At Sea.