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NewImages Festival is the most important annual gathering for immersive creation in continental Europe. An international festival and market of digital creation and virtual worlds, held in Paris each April, with Industry Days that bring together XR professionals from across the global immersive sector. The 2025 edition was the eighth. The 2026 edition is happening…
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London Experience Week is the most useful annual gathering for senior buyers and builders in the experience economy. Run by the World Experience Organisation, it convenes a tightly curated group of producers, operators, and studio principals from around the world for a week of sessions, behind-the-scenes tours of London’s most ambitious experiences, and the kind…
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SXSW 2025 wrapped in Austin in March of last year. With ten months of perspective, what stood out then is mostly still standing now — and a few things I dismissed at the time turned out to matter more than they looked. This is a field note from the perspective of someone who designs immersive…
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The three most-confused words in this industry are experiential, immersive, and interactive. Buyers use them as synonyms. Studios use them inconsistently from one proposal to the next. Trade press treats them as a single category. They are not synonyms. The difference matters because each word maps to a different production model, a different budget structure,…
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I work with a specific category of event producer: the ones whose business model is built on attendees leaving changed. Not entertained. Not impressed. Changed. Producers like Mindvalley and Hay House. The personal-development conference circuit. Faith-rooted leadership intensives. Executive transformation retreats. Producers organizing multi-day gatherings whose explicit promise is that the attendee will be different…
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“Creative direction” is the phrase that does the most work in our industry, and the least defining. Every studio claims to provide it. Most are providing something else — project management, art direction, or vendor coordination — and calling it creative direction because the term commands a higher rate. When I describe what I do,…
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Most projection-mapping projects fail before the first projector is ordered. They fail at the artist-selection meeting. The same is true for most large-scale interactive installations — they fail at the lighting designer choice, the sound designer choice, the fabricator choice. The technology is rarely the failure point. The team is. After more than a decade…
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Most of my industry treats Burning Man as a cultural curiosity that happens to involve large-scale art. That framing misses the point. Black Rock City is the most ambitious immersive environment built every year, anywhere — and it’s built almost entirely by volunteers, with no central creative authority, on a one-week deadline, in a desert…
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I’ve taken a lot of first calls over the years. The senior producers who eventually become great clients have one thing in common: they’ve usually made every mistake on this list at least once, and they’ve stopped making them. These are the three. Mistake 1: Confusing the deliverable with the outcome The most common opening…
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Most first calls between a senior producer and an immersive studio go the same way. The producer describes a vision. The studio nods. Both sides walk away energized. Then the studio sends a proposal that misses the brief by thirty percent, the producer revises the brief to save the proposal, and a project that was…