In February 2024, The Art Newspaper identified a new form of 21st-century digital art venue we called the immersive institution. We described it as “signalling a tipping point in the way the world consumes visual culture while posing a challenge for museums and galleries in their present form”. In the year since, the scales have tipped further.

Enabled by advances in LED screens, projection and spatial audio, supported by big investors, and the rising public profile of digital artists such as Refik Anadol, the immersive institution, from its first incarnation in 2019 to our first audit a year ago, had more than 100 instances around the world. By the end of 2024, that number stood at more than 350, including a second type of immersive institution, which is scaling even faster than its predecessor thanks to developments in virtual reality (VR) headset technology in the past three years. The first wave of digital art galleries took five years to reach 100—the second wave has reached 50 in little more than a year.

Celina Yeh, the executive director of HTC’s Vive Arts, describes the technological advances behind this VR-driven wave: “As headsets have become lighter, more comfortable and less tethered, the possibilities for free-roaming exploration have expanded. In addition, the technology necessary for the headsets to recognise where they are in space and how visitors’ bodies are moving opens new realms of possibilities for interactivity.”

The rise of immersive expeditions

What this has meant is that operators can now offer audiences long-form experiences, walking with relative freedom through venues usually located in disused retail or commercial property, and wearing tetherless VR headsets.

One of the pioneering success stories of this medium is Horizon of Khufu. It starts as a guided tour through one of the great pyramids, and rapidly becomes an imaginative trip into Egyptian mythology, ending with a spectacular journey into the land of the dead.

Khufu shows just how fast this new medium can grow. One of four “immersive expeditions” produced by Excurio, it first opened in Paris in October 2022. Fabien Barati, the chief executive of Excurio, told The Art Newspaper that “the launch of our format is a big success so far: we attracted more than 2 million visitors and our network is growing, counting 20 venues today”. Those shows are genuinely worldwide—in Calgary and Montreal, Sydney, Atlanta and New York, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Paris, Lyon, Istanbul, Yokohama and beyond.

A new alignment of venue operators, content distributors and ticketing partners is supporting the growth of this emerging content market. Khufu’s venues are operated by Eclipso, a subsidiary of the French entertainment venue operator Hadrena. Where Eclipso does not operate the venues directly, distribution is handled by partners including HTC themselves, with Yeh describing how “distribution is an essential part of the work we do” and how HTC taps into their “institutional and venue networks to distribute and license free-roaming virtual reality experiences to audiences globally, to help build the ecosystem”.

This very close alignment between a leading technology company and the growth of a medium echoes the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) art, where advances in creativity go hand in hand with deep partnerships between artists and AI developers such as Google.

Emerging alongside Excurio is a Barcelona-based producer, Univrse. Already claiming its shows have been seen more than two million times, it offers “Europe’s largest multi-user VR experience”, Pompeii, the Last Gladiator, at present showing in Munich as well as Barcelona. Another Pompeii show is in Madrid, while a Tutankhamun show is in four cities across Europe and Latin America and a Titanic show isin Milan and the US.

Beyond Excurio and Univrse, companies like Istanbul’s VR Future, the operator of “Turkey’s first private virtual reality museum”, or China’s Metavision show this to be a global emerging market. The rapid distribution of shows like this makes their marketing easier—Tripadvisor reviews or Instagram videos can be from any of the venues, creating a weight of digital audience response that allows these shows to bypass validation from mainstream media. This is amplified by ticketing and marketing partnerships operating with platforms such as Fever, which offers an all-in-one sales, digital and influencer marketing solution for making noise and filling venues.

The parallels between these shows’ choice of heritage narrative themes and the early stages of the digital art gallery, which saw shows based on works by Van Gogh and others, are clear. The possibility for this scene may be that it unites a decade’s worth of—largely non-commercial but highly creative—exploration in museums, galleries and heritage organisations with the potential of VR.

The use of VR in museums, galleries and heritage in the UK has been stimulated and supported by publicly funded initiatives such as Creative XR and the forthcoming CoStar National Lab. Creative XR was a programme that began in 2017 and funded more than 60 immersive content prototypes over three cohorts, with 12 going on to receive more than £850,000 in full production funding. It helped develop the careers of VR artists such as Darren Emerson of East City Films, whose In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, both a history and experience of Coventry’s rave scene, has seen enormous touring success, including a sell-out run at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

StoryFutures was a programme developed by Royal Holloway University and the National Film and Television School that created VR projects with the National Gallery, Royal Opera House and others and sent 15 cultural VR experiences to libraries and art venues around the country in 2023. StoryFutures has now morphed into the CoStar National Lab, a £100m investment in the future of the UK’s screen industries by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. James Bennett, the project’s director, tells The Art Newspaper: “CoStar National Lab is here to support creators and distributors in looking around the corner, to what comes ‘after next’ in emerging technologies. The National Lab will officially open its doors in January 2026, but our R&D work starts long before.”

Around Europe, the excitement among content creators about free-roam VR, and its possible route to a scalable business model, is palpable. Joël Kremer, the chief operating officer of Moyosa Media, a Dutch-based immersive agency that produced the VR content for the Mauritshuis’s hit Loot–Ten Stories show, tells The Art Newspaper that “when done correctly and at a high level, technology can contribute massively to the cultural sector”. Loot–Ten Stories was a demonstration of how rich and complex VR content drawn from cultural heritage can be. “During the experience, the VR headsets change the world around the users but the artworks stay in exactly the same place,” Kremer explains. “We used HTC lighthouses [special modules that the VR headset can track] to anchor the VR experiences to the real world. This enforces the feeling of being transported to those locations. We used photogrammetry scans of the actual location to get a 3D model. We refined these models to make the world feel realistic and also look amazing. We also integrated real-life footage into the 3D world to make the experience even more immersive. Lastly, we implemented 3D spatial audio, immersing users in the sounds of swarming bats, a cannon fire, and a conversation… discussing the impending destruction of a Rembrandt.”

AR integrated into live performance

Europe’s most awarded immersive project in the past year has come from Oslo, where Glitch Studios in partnership with the theatre companies Nordland Teater, Teater Vestland and Teatret Vårt produced what Sami Hamid, the co-founderof Glitch Studios, describes as “Europe’s first live theatre performance to integrate augmented reality (AR), creating an immersive theatre experience that blends virtual characters and set pieces with live actors on stage”. Hamid sees the possibility of free-roam VR as a new medium of immense potential, noting that “free-roam VR anchors the audience within an immersive story, offering them agency and inviting participation”.

Agency and participation—or what Barati calls “an unparalleled sense of freedom and presence”—are the drivers of this new market. Untethering the headset and allowing people to move has opened up a nexus of rich storytelling opportunity and global commercial demand, and sets the scene for an ongoing evolution of experience that Bennett describes as offering “increasingly personalised and real-time responsive experiences for visitors”.

It has also built a bridge connecting a decade of experimentation by great collections and sites of global cultural heritage in VR with a new wave of content producers. In the year since The Art Newspaper analysed the immersive institution, the first touring partnership between one, Frameless, and a leading UK museum, the National Portrait Gallery, was announced. With free-roam VR venues looking set to scale even faster than those showing digital art on large-format screens, new doors of collaboration are opening for museums and galleries worldwide.