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 as I write this.

I pay attention to NewImages because the work shown there is different from the work shown at the American conferences. The American immersive industry has been shaped, over the last decade, by tech-platform money, brand-activation budgets, and the venture model’s appetite for scalable formats. The European immersive industry has been shaped by public arts funding, cultural-institution partnerships, and a longer artistic lineage. The work coming out of those two ecosystems looks meaningfully different.

This is what NewImages 2025 said about the difference, and what I’m taking back to client work.

What the work showed

Three observations from the 2025 festival.

The aesthetic ambition is higher. This is uncomfortable to say as someone who works primarily in the American market, but it’s true. The artists and studios producing immersive work in Europe — particularly in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries — are operating at a higher aesthetic level than most of the American work I see at AWE or SXSW. The pieces are more formally rigorous. The conceptual frames are more developed. The relationship to art history and continental philosophy is closer to the surface.

This isn’t because European artists are inherently better. It’s because the funding model is different. Most of the work at NewImages is supported by some combination of public arts grants, cultural-institution partnerships, and broadcast or platform commissions that prioritize artistic quality over commercial scalability. The American work, by contrast, is mostly commissioned by clients who need it to do commercial work — brand lift, ticket sales, footfall. Different funding produces different work.

The interaction design is stranger. The American industry has converged on a relatively narrow set of interaction patterns — touchscreens, motion tracking, voice input, headset-based VR. The European work plays with a wider set of inputs and outputs. Pieces driven by breath, by collective presence, by environmental data, by the negative space of the audience’s movement. Some of these are gimmicky. Most are not. They’re operating in a design space the American industry hasn’t fully mapped.

The relationship to time is longer. The pieces shown at NewImages tend to ask for more sustained attention than the American work I’m used to. Twenty minutes is short. An hour is normal. Two- and three-hour pieces are present. The American instinct to design for the impatient audience produces work optimized for short attention spans. The European work is willing to ask for more, and often gets it.

What the Industry Days revealed

The Industry Days at NewImages are smaller and more substantive than the equivalent at most American conferences. The conversations are between people who are actually making work, in a room small enough that everyone gets to speak.

Three things stood out.

The funding conversation is unsolved. The same producers whose work is more aesthetically rigorous than the American equivalent are also more financially precarious. The public-grant model that funds the work is shrinking. The platform-commission model that supplemented it is contracting. The path from grant-funded artistic practice to sustainable studio business is harder in Europe than it is in the US, even though the work is often better.

This is going to produce migration — European studios looking for American clients, American producers looking for European collaborators, both for reasons that aren’t quite about the work itself.

The XR-as-cinema framing is stronger in Europe. A significant portion of the Industry Days was given over to the question of how immersive work fits into the broader screen-based cultural economy. Festival distribution, broadcaster commissions, theatrical adaptations. The European producers in the room treat immersive work as a category of cinema, with a comparable distribution and curation infrastructure. The American industry doesn’t yet think this way; it treats immersive work as either tech demo or brand activation.

The European framing is, I think, the right one. Immersive work is closer to cinema than to either tech or marketing. The American industry will eventually move in this direction. The European industry is already there.

The collaboration patterns are different. European immersive teams are smaller, longer-running, and more frequently composed of repeat collaborators. Studios that have worked together across multiple projects, over many years. The American model — assembling a fresh team for each project — is alien to most of the producers in the room.

I take both lessons. There’s value in the project-by-project curation model I run on. There’s also value in the long-collaborative-relationship model that NewImages-tier work tends to produce. The right answer is probably a hybrid: a stable inner network of collaborators you keep returning to, with project-specific specialists curated around them.

What I’m taking into client work

The aesthetic bar is higher than the American conference floor suggests. Clients should be benchmarking against European work, not against the trade-show floor at AWE.

The interaction design space is wider than the American convergence on touchscreens and motion. There’s room for stranger inputs in client work, and the audiences are readier for them than producers assume.

Long-form attention is more available than the design defaults suggest. Some of my clients are designing for ninety-second engagements when their audiences would willingly give twenty minutes. The right design rewards the longer engagement.

Immersive work is closer to cinema than to tech. The clients who frame their projects this way produce better work than the ones who frame them as activations or tech showcases.

That last one is the one I think about most. Where this industry ends up — as a branch of marketing, as a branch of tech, or as a branch of cinema — is the question that decides what kind of work gets commissioned for the next twenty years.

Alt Ethos works with a small number of producers each year on flagship immersive projects. To start a conversation: [CTA link]