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…

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…

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…

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…

Three days at AWE 2025 in Long Beach. Sixteenth edition of the conference. Six thousand attendees, two hundred and fifty exhibitors, four hundred and fifty speakers. The official theme was the AI+XR imperative. The press releases declared XR’s mainstream moment. They’ve been declaring it every year since 2010. What I actually saw, sorted by what…