Walk into most electronics stores and you’ll find VR headsets sitting beside game consoles, smart devices, and display screens. The most successful commercial push for these devices once came from social media companies that hoped you might be putting on a headset a few times a week, to connect with family, explore virtual worlds, or even work and attend meetings in the clean, corporate spaces that were designed to facilitate such interactions. However, as it became clear that either people weren’t ready for these spaces, or preferred the hand-held comfort of a cell-phone, virtual reality headset’s status as a gaming platform rather than those other intended purposes became increasingly assured. Amid the hype, artists, creators, and developers quietly moved into this new creative space, and started making work that has been at once startling and engaging, marking the arrival of a new storytelling form.
As this new community grew, distinct types of work and experience emerged, supported by installations in museums and galleries, in digital spaces, downloadable through the gaming platform Steam, YouTube, and Meta TV, proliferating new work that could be accessed within the headset. Finally, there was work that could experienced at film and animation festivals through an immersive track, or in a VR Lab.
At Carnegie Mellon, the SONA Immersive Storytelling Festival has been created to nurture this community, to bring people together to share their work, meet their audiences, and celebrate the intense effort, collaboration, and creativity that comes with producing these pieces. It is a small gathering for now, but this also provides an intimacy, immediacy, and sensitivity that may be lacking in other places, where immersive work is often marginalized, even literally sometimes as it’s frequently geographically removed from the more traditional offering of a festival.
At SONA, where I’m the festival director, we want to acknowledge how creators have experimented with the technology and established ways of developing new work that can include elements of game development, theater production, 3D animation, and filmmaking. Immersive virtual storytellings sits comfortably between these disciplines, drawing on a variety of different artistic approaches with bringing together collaborators with a breadth of skills in writing, coding, modeling, drawing, and filming. Some immersive experiences, such as Singing Chen’s The Man Who Couldn’t Leave, draw from theater and performance, rather than game development. In a fascinating behind the scenes video, we see the director cup her hands around her eyes, mimicking the lenses of a headset, as she instructs actors, and blocks out scenes. Chen is the camera, thinking about her choices about looking, where she is filling the frame and how she intentionally wants to lead our gaze, so that we feel it’s our own choice, when in fact we can look anywhere, and everywhere.
The film critic Mark Cousins, in the coda to The Story of Film: An Odyssey raises the question of whether VR is cinema, or something else entirely. Maybe it’s an important question, but one only a few creators, at least those that I’ve spoken with, are pausing work to answer. They don’t need it to be one thing or the other, rather they want to tell stories, explore the medium, and lean into the undefined nature of immersive storytelling, that they find so compelling. Where cinema is focused on the frame, in VR there is no frame, you can look up, down, side to side, at any moment. Your eye is led by story, sometimes a movement or a narrowing of space, while sometimes seeing only what is lit, and at other times, like a camera obscura, seeing the whole world flood through a lens in high definition. Immense, like you’ve never seen it before.
Immersive storytelling centers the viewer; sometimes you move passively through a world, like Patrick Swayze’s ghost (a surprisingly much used reference for VR scholars), but in other experiences you have agency, you’re seen by the other inhabitants of the space, you can make choices, affect change, open doors, pull levers, even speak with characters, or join a crowd as if you were one of the characters. In immersive storytelling there is no fourth wall, because there is no wall. It’s like a child’s dream of climbing inside the television screen.
As you can imagine, these possibilities provide exciting promises for creators, for now they can bring you into a story, literally put you inside an experience. This is the point when the relationship between viewer and participant is blurred, and while it is almost impossible to forget you’re wearing a headset, or that there are people shuffling around behind you, or that the image is digital, you inhabit a liminal space where images are immediate and your sense of space and proximity relate directly to the story you’re experiencing.
It’s these experiences of immersive storytelling that SONA aims to showcase. Four days of curated immersive works, the majority using virtual reality, with some other augmented, interactive, and installation works. Here you will find these experiences, along with talks from creators and academics exploring virtual spaces while establishing new forms of dialogue with this medium and helping to shape the language of immersive storytelling. The festival is free and open to the public, at Carnegie Mellon University. SONA is a project of The Kenner Room, a dedicated space for exploring language and culture through emerging technologies, part of the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics within Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. The students working on SONA share an interdisciplinary approach with many of the creators of immersive works. In all the work presented at the festival, there is a desire to explore the boundaries of narrative form, to be inspired by the technology, and its affordances. It’s the way that filmmakers have worked for the past 130 years, ever since the Lumière Brothers thrilled and terrified audiences with the sight of a train arriving at the station, seeming to burst from the screen.
The festival argues that stories told through immersive media are as valid and important, as those in books, or on screens, or recorded as albums. We’re experiencing a new form of storytelling – immersive, interactive, embodied. These act as three interlocking concepts; spatial environments, where stories live, that play with perception of virtual, constructed or real-life environments, again with the viewer at the center; then the opportunity to interact and become part of that environment through physical movement, whether that’s moving your head to look around, using a haptic controller in your hand, or even making gestures or sounds, that can affect that environment and change what’s taking place. The last of these concepts, embodiment, is perhaps one of most challenging to engineer, or harder to articulate. The sensation that you might actually be in this world, that you’re experiencing it not just through your eyes, but your whole body, is radical. It’s about conveying the physical sensation you might feel when you see a child approach the edge of the curb, or the sensation in your gut when you witness a skateboarder hit the floor. This idea of embodied cognition, as the Italian cyber-psychologist Guiseppe Riva describes it, is central to the very best immersive experiences. We don’t just watch it, we feel it.
The concept of embodied cognition is one that unlocks other sensations and feelings. In a VR documentary we might be returned to the texture of lived experience, to the specific historical moment as it was inhabited by people who were once in the places being recorded. Memory, in immersive media, is not an archival process, but rather it is a sense of recall, perhaps a primeval one, that is spatial, embodied, and experienced in the present tense.
SONA’s program engages with this in a number of ways. Black Star Sanctuary, a collaboration between Pittsburgh and UK artists, takes you on a journey, guided by the Rainbow Serpent, into a vast temple shaped by queer African spiritual and cosmological traditions. Moving through the environment becomes an act of reclamation, restoring narratives erased by colonial and heteronormative pasts. Similarly, Uju Anya talks about creating an Afro-metaverse that imagines a space of representation, imagination, and sanctuary; and Mame-Fatou Niang’s research, and projects in the banlieues of Paris, France speak to cultural self-determination, and the creation of art through the conservation of community, and identity through immersive sound.
Two of the most distinctive works this year include Diatribes directed by Veronica Graham and created by the group Most Ancient and J Dakota Powell’s The Golden Toad. Both occupy similar liminal spaces, new territory, hallucinatory, non-linear environments built around sensation, and story. Both works seek out sensations of embodiment, guiding the viewer through a series of encounters. Diatribes layers climate anxiety and emotional geography into an experience that is as much like dreaming as watching. The Golden Toad offers something similarly unmoored, a world of exploration, imagery, like flying over a strange new land.
Indigenous filmmakers, such as Táhila Moss (aka Mintz), a Yaqui artist, whose piece Ancestral Gratitude Bridge will be showing at SONA, have been among the most searching of creators, recognizing in immersive media, affordances that other conventional filmmaking could not provide. To place the viewer inside a story rather than before it, to surround them with language, landscape, and ritual rather than framing these as objects of observation is to resist an ethnographic gaze that has historically positioned indigenous culture as subjects rather than storytellers in their own right. Immersive stories often mirror those told in communities, in gatherings, in the round, rather than face on, on a stage.
Documentary practice sits at the other end of the program’s range. Flavio Mayerhofer’s As Tall as the Heart from Brazil, follows the everyday lives and shared experiences of three friends with different types of bone dysplasia who share dwarfism as a common characteristic. It belongs to a VR documentary tradition pioneered by Al Jazeera’s Contrast VR unit, or those of the New York Times, and Guardian, early adopters who recognized that they could place viewers inside a situation, make them experience first-hand, rather than reporting from it. There’s been a debate about how successful this style of news has been, with many challenging its effectiveness as an agent of empathy; these new documentaries use the form in more intimate ways, to bring proximity, to fold viewers into a conversation.
Finally, experiences exploring heritage and history inspire a new awards category this year. No work in the program makes that case more powerfully than Judi Alston and Andy Campbell’s Revealed series of experiences, including a VR film, installation, and Augmented Reality game. Their work on the British miners’ strikes of 1984 – 1985 period takes us back into memory; it is a rich, textured experience, not just nostalgia for community, for industry, and the union, but a clarion cry to a return of the solidarity that brought people together, to fight for their survival.
You may be coming to immersive storytelling for the first time, and you won’t be alone. The majority of our audience will be in exactly the same position of never having put on a headset. It can be a strange and disorienting experience, but hopefully also a fascinating and enjoyable one. You will be guided and supported by students and staff, who are sensitive to the vulnerability of entering a virtual space, who will be on hand to assist you, and give you the time to reflect on the stories that you’ll experience. As an audience member you’re contributing to the grammar and understanding of this medium. The creators come precisely because they want to see how people experience these works. They are often moved and surprised by the feelings, the memories, and emotions that their works elicit. Immersive media asks you to be active, we want you to encounter something new, and perhaps. the sensations will stay with you. Perhaps the stories will live inside you, in the moment, when you were there.
SONA Immersive Storytelling Festival runs 2-4 April 2026 at CMU – for more information, to register for the festival and reserve a VR viewing spot, visit sonafestival.com
