Adelaide Fringe Festival 2026 - Immersive Worlds - part 2
In this post, I'm discussing the immersive worlds at the Adelaide Fringe. I attended the Fringe festival in March 2026, and I’ll share some thoughts on producing and presenting this kind of content.
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/immersive-worlds
A little bit of a preamble → I work in software development making apps, games & XR. I am especially interested in how technology can be used in location based entertainment (LBE). I was quite impressed with the immersive programming for the Adelaide Fringe which runs for the entire five- week duration of the festival; this was a great opportunity for such work to be exposed to a larger audience & immersive worlds was prominently featured on the main website for the festival, I saw:
- 2 360º dome videos
- 3 VR experiences
- an interactive cinema experience using cell phones & a cinema screen
I'm a sponge for knowledge; I like to learn things, and I'm also interested in how technology can enhance content. Most of what I experienced was documentary work.
My first exposure to dome video was at the Adelaide Fringe in 2024. 360º dome video is easy for participants to use as you don't have to put on a headset; you just go sit on the floor position yourself & let the experience happen - ok you do have to orient yourself in the space. I do like VR & it has its place for creating experiences & requiring headsets for each viewer for each screening. If interaction is key to the experience, I’d recommend VR. Dome video does require using a dedicated space or having an installable dome cinema. The cost of VR headsets can add up quickly & having a sufficiently large enough dome can cost a bit of money (of course they can be rented).
Actually, as I thought about it while reviewing this post, I realized I’d experienced a form of 360º dome cinema years ago at the Starry Cafe at Haneda Airport in Japan. It’s well worth checking out if you’re at the airport and have time before your flight. Having short-form movies at an airport is a good idea, in my opinion.
I went to 2 of the 4 venues used for the Immersive Worlds content: the Mercury movie theatre and the Olympic Hall Cultural Centre, which housed the 360° dome cinema and two VR areas.
A side note: Adelaide still has many notable modernist & art deco theatres for live performances & cinema going.
https://www.adelaideexaminer.com/best-art-deco-buildings-adelaide/
Waypoints
I give the planners of the event compliments for the signage to get this venue. I have been to many events & sometimes finding the venue can be a mission in itself. To get the Olympic Hall venue there were numerous waypoints on the sidewalks (or footpath in Australian English) in the area.
The exterior of the dome cinema
I really like the use of typography here to create the immersive worlds logo
The Great Kimberly Wilderness
- VR movie
This was incredible. I learned about places in North Eastern Australia in Queensland that I had never heard about. Such beautiful & unique vistas. There was one part filmed on the Great Devonian coral reef. I had not seen anything like that before. This was being presented using Pico headsets. Pico headsets can be quite affordable compared to other models. The video quality was decent. On a higher quality headset the video experience would be incredible; I do have an Apple Vision Pro which is a significantly more costly headset (it would be so good to be able to watch this movie on an AVP).
https://www.whitesparkpictures.com.au/the-great-kimberley-wilderness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7Lqzr1mcZ4&t=4s
I would have liked to know if there was a website to continue the experience and learn more about this part of Australia. I felt there was a missed opportunity here: having a QR code displayed on the cinema screen linking to a website would be great. I asked some of the other patrons at the screening if they had been to this part of Queensland, and they had. I would really like to visit this part of Australia and see it with my own eyes. In that sense, this documentary showed me a place I’d never known about before—one I might visit someday. I did some web searching about the reef.
https://www.internationalparks.org/australia/Devonian Reef
As the screening was in a cinema, you could watch the an edit of the movie for cinema if you did not want to experience the documentary in VR or there was an issue with the headset.
Monsieur Vincent
The use a flat screen with a trailer makes the overall experience much fuller
- VR interactive
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/monsieur-vincent-immersive-worlds-af2026
https://unframed-collection.com/en/experiences/monsieur-vincent
This was a guided VR experience in that you are taken on a path through the content sections. It was really well done; Van Gogh is obviously a well known artist & I actually learned some new things about his art via this VR experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk55tV-DR0U
Iwakura
You really want to experience this in 3D
- 360º dome video
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/iwakura-immersive-worlds-af2026
I was especially looking forward to this audio visual experience. This was a work by a Japanese audio artist Kazuya Nagaya with a visual artist from Germany Ali Demirel.
Co-produced by MUTEK Japan and Miraikan (The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo), with funding from the Goethe-Institut, this project is designed specifically for planetarium environments
https://youtu.be/uDldw92dgIU?si=CujStPNRlkqHNnhm
This work was made a few years ago back in 2022. As I watched it at first, I found the imagery somewhat bleak with the colour palette - it reminded me of a bad dream; this was short lived, it got much better & there was many different parts to the movie. I did find myself wondering how the visuals were made by Ali. There are some making of videos online. It did not quite delve too deeply into how it was made - it seems like photogrammetry was used with some of the twisty visuals done in a graphics engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5v-jiW9FEu8&t=664s
I wonder how this work might be travelling around the world with it first appearing in Japan and now in Australia at the Adelaide Fringe.
Megafauna of the Great Southern Reef
- VR movie
This might be the closest I will ever come to scuba diving. A good example of VR experience taking one to place that might get a chance to visit in real life.
Fire Escape
- immersive - interactive using cell phones and web browsers & a cinema screen
Fire Escape on the cinema screen at the Mercury theatre
Blurry cell phone photo of the web app used to change the audio to listen in on
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/fire-escape-immersive-worlds-af2026
Coincidentally, Ink Studios had a game at Signals in 2025 in Vancouver which is my home city.
A description of the plot:
When a murder occurs in a gentrifying Brooklyn building, you must peer into the lives of its diverse tenants, making difficult narrative choices to uncover hidden secrets and unravel the mystery. Every window reveals a new story, every decision shapes your understanding, and every moment heightens the tension as you navigate the blurred lines between voyeurism and investigation in this immersive, anxiety-fueled exploration of urban life and human connection.
This was a very ambitious immersive experience. There was some technical difficulties with using the web app to connect to the audio - there was an audience of maybe about 50 people at the screening I went to. Using a cell phone, you could listen in to conversations in the different rooms in the apartment building. I was getting kicked out of the browser a few times - fat fingers? And sometimes when I was changing the room to listen it, there a long delay before the page would load & I kept tapping - I managed to the get the audio stream playing multiples times at once. I did mention the technical problem to the staff at the venue & they were not able to help. They could have at least noted the issue to send back to Ink Studios…
There was also a kind of hacker character who appears part of the way through the story; you cannot think too much about such story elements 😜 - I say this coming from having done some script writing where sometimes you suspend belief for the mechanics of progressing the story. I did find this hacker character a bit of a trope.
The game experience was being presented in real-time on the cinema screen. It was a lot to be dropped into - it did take a few minutes to understand how to interact with the experience. It was a time limited event which by the end the collective inputs of the audience would determine the outcome. It might been a better if there was a short tutorial at the beginning before starting the main story.
You could be listening to the audio of the selected room on headphones while also hearing the audio coming from the cinema - this was a bit of a challenge getting bombarded with so much sensory input.
https://www.inkstories.com/projects/fireescapelive.html
I’m glad I went, but ultimately it was a flawed experience. Maybe the complexity of the story was too much to present in this format. It made me think about how, with some immersive experiences, giving the user too much freedom can be detrimental—especially when the journey ends up feeling unsatisfying. I often feel there needs to be some kind of editorial or guided path through the experience.
I experienced a VR project a few years ago that was presented in a museum; the setup and presentation—with a video wall and waiting area—were well done, but the actual VR experience was open-world. You were left to wander without any real guidance, and I missed one of the main sections because there was a time limit to explore.
This reminds me of the work I did in interactive TV at the BBC, adding interaction to broadcast TV. TV is mostly a sit-back experience, compared to a game where you sit up and engage—Fire Escape is straddling both types of experiences.
The experience can also be played in VR as a single-player experience. I don’t know how the live experience differs.
https://www.inkstories.com/FIREESCAPE/index.html
A Sound Healing Journey
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/a-sound-healing-journey-af2026
Before the event, how many universities do you know with a planetarium?
This was something different - a group meditation experience using sound in a planetarium.
More than a performance, this is a journey, where you will be taken on an experience submerged in healing frequencies and the lull of the Himalayan Singing Bowls that fill our dome, under the backdrop of a star filled night sky.
Lastly, I wanted to mention a VR work by a friend was being shown in Adelaide coincidentally. I had seen this project by Camille Baker; it was featured as part of the immersive content at the film festival at the BFI (British Film Institute in London) some years ago. This VR work is a very thoughtful experience about a serious subject - people who have lived through cancer.
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/mammary-mountain-af2026