Venice Immersive closed its 2026 competition on Saturday, September 12, with a clean three-prize board: China’s The Pigeon Ring took the Grand Prize, the U.S. fire documentary Out of the Ashes took the Special Jury Prize, and Peter Flaherty’s shared Vision Pro drama Empire at Sea took the Achievement Prize.
The official results come from the Biennale’s awards bulletin, announced at the Saturday 7:00 p.m. ceremony. The Venice Immersive Jury — chaired by Paul Raphaël, with Négar Motevalymeidanshah and Kate Voet — judged 30 projects in competition. Variety and IndieWire published the same Immersive slate alongside the Golden Lion winners.
Grand Prize: The Pigeon Ring
The Pigeon Ring, directed by Yuqi Zhang and Shixin Tao, is a 35-minute Chinese work listed for virtual reality and immersive installation. On the Biennale Cinema page, granddaughter Lyn takes her grandfather back to a long-abandoned family home to hunt for a missing pigeon leg band. Searching the rooms unlocks memory, obsession, and regret — a story the directors say grew from Zhang’s childhood and from reconstructing a real family house with Gaussian Splatting so visitors can walk the space at their own pace.
China Daily reported Venice Immersive co-curator Liz Rosenthal calling that splat-based reconstruction a particularly innovative approach. The VR Critic experienced the piece on Quest 3 and framed it as intimate spatial storytelling rather than spectacle. Xinhua, via The Star, confirmed the Grand Prize win on closing night.
Special Jury Prize: Out of the Ashes
Out of the Ashes, from Rory Mitchell and Nonny de la Peña, is an immersive documentary about people who lost homes in the 2025 Los Angeles fires. Arizona State University says students and faculty from ASU’s Narrative and Emerging Media program began scanning burn sites in January 2025; the finished piece runs about 25–26 minutes across vignettes, with spatial capture and Gaussian-splat reconstructions that put viewers in the ash of former homes. The VR Critic called it a striking portrait of place and memory. De la Peña’s long track record in immersive journalism is the through-line; the Special Jury Prize is the festival’s public vote of confidence in that method.
Achievement Prize: Empire at Sea
Empire at Sea by Peter Flaherty takes the Achievement Prize — the third Immersive honor. We covered the piece earlier today as a closing-day format story: up to ten Apple Vision Pros around a custom LED table, volumetric actors in passthrough, and a branching solarpunk oil-rig drama. The Biennale listing clocks it at 22 minutes. The Achievement Prize lands on hardware-and-format ambition as much as narrative polish. Full setup notes are in our Empire at Sea Venice wrap.
What the board says about XR right now
All three winners lean on spatial capture or shared presence rather than pure game loops. Two of them — The Pigeon Ring and Out of the Ashes — put Gaussian Splatting in the critical conversation for photoreal memory spaces. Empire at Sea keeps Vision Pro and multi-user passthrough on the awards table. Venice Immersive’s 2026 competition slate ran 30 works; the festival itself spanned September 2–12 on Lazzaretto Vecchio. The awards bulletin is the primary source. Treat secondary coverage as confirmation of the same three titles, not as a fourth prize.
Sources: La Biennale official awards; The Pigeon Ring page; Variety; IndieWire; China Daily; The Star / Xinhua; ASU News; The VR Critic; Metaverse Watcher Empire at Sea coverage.