There is currently no established go-to place to find these up and coming narrative or playable VR experiences easily, like there is for film releases through FDA. In this article, we’ll look at two potential places to source these sorts of broader screen content that you could exhibit for your audiences.
Tech company platforms:
A lot of the VR platforms, and other gaming platforms that cater to VR audiences, do list their content in online stores:
Meta - Platform for Meta Quest headsets
Epic Games - Platform for PC games, including VR
VivePort - Platform for VR games and apps
Apple Vision Pro - List of experiences suitable for the Apple Vision Pro
Steam - Platform for PC and Mac games, including VR
While this may seem like a good place to start, we need to be careful with this approach. Firstly, a lot of these online platforms don’t sort their games from their narrative experiences, so if you want to focus on programming storytelling and low-interaction experiences then you have to spend a lot of time sifting through the libraries of experiences. Although Viveport does allow you to filter search results to focus on narrative experiences, and the Apple Vision Pro has a lot of narrative content available easily, most online stores of VR content are heavily game focused. This isn’t necessarily a problem if you want to exhibit more interactive experiences, but if you want your broader screen programme to feature more cinematic and film adjacent content then it can be hard to locate these experiences.
Licensing Content:
The main hurdle with exhibiting these experiences is that you will need to negotiate a commercial license with the production company or game studio. This can take a long time, especially if you are negotiating with a wide range of companies for one exhibition or if these companies haven’t issued this sort of license before. This is the standard route, at the moment, for curating a VR exhibition for your venue, but given the lack of guidelines and established business plans, the fees and demands can vary from producer to producer. Some may be fine with a guarantee paid to them up front, or a portion of the tickets sold for the event, especially if they come from a live performance background. Others may want a licensing fee, as is more usual for companies from a film and gaming background.
However, there are some companies, Felix & Paul, Atlas V, MBD, Chronic Insanity, and Second Theatre, that own a collection of licensable VR and immersive content and have developed their own agreements for this sort of commercial exhibition. If you want to exhibit high-quality broader screen experiences for your audiences, and you can’t dedicate the staff time to make many individual enquiries, then booking your exhibition with one of these experience suppliers might be a good first move.
Film festival platforms:
If you want to find online lists of available experiences to tour to your venue, then another idea might be to look at the immersive programme of film and arts festivals.
UK based
Worldwide
By selecting work that has appeared at these festivals you can be more likely sure of its quality, compared to some of the work available on tech company platforms. Also, if the experience in question has toured to a festival, or a couple of festivals in some instances, then it might already have more robust touring, licensing, and distribution plans in place, which should make it more frictionless for venues like you to exhibit their work. Lastly, the culture of submitting to these festivals is often that producers and artists hope for their work to have a life after the festival, so these experiences might not only be better suited for touring but have teams behind them more willing to work with you to get your exhibition of their work up and running.
Venues programming broader screen content:
Why not look at other venues programming broader screen content to find experiences for your programme! In the UK, we have a number of cinemas and arts venues that have a commitment to programming this sort of work, including BOCS at the Wales Millenium Centre, FACT in Liverpool, Broadway Cinema in Nottingham, Undershed at Watershed in Bristol, and Barbican in London. If work is being exhibited at one or several of these venues then it’s a good sign that the producers are looking to tour the experience to other venues. It also gives you a vote of confidence that the experience in question is good enough for audiences to be exposed to, given that these other venues wouldn’t choose to exhibit something that didn’t work, was difficult to use, or that doesn’t meet the aesthetic quality of the rest of their exhibition programme. Something already having passed through the festival or art venue circuit in the UK is a good sign to something being worth including in your own broader screen programming.