Still: The Imaginary Friend - Steye Hallema

Keeping track of a field in transition can be a challenge—with the immersive realm continuously redefining itself and reconfiguring its parameters, alongside new technologies and formats emerging in parallel. This article maps the Dutch immersive scene over the past five years: tracing its creative trajectory, highlighting landmark projects and pioneers, and unpacking the ecosystem that has allowed a relatively small country to punch well above its weight.

A scene in motion
The remarkable coalescing of Dutch immersive did not emerge overnight. According to Avinash Changa, VR maker, creative technologist and founder of Amsterdam-based immersive technology studio WeMakeVR, the Netherlands has been actively shaping immersive storytelling for over a decade. “The first years were dominated by 360-degree video—works built around the initial ‘wow factor’ of presence,” Changa recounts. That phase, however, was never an endpoint.

Makers began asking more complex questions: Can audiences interact? Can they move, speak, collaborate, influence outcomes? With that, works reached beyond the VR headset alone, expanding and evolving into immersive pieces, installation-led experiences, collective performances, participatory work and more.

“The Netherlands was one of the key countries at the forefront of figuring out where narrative immersive work was going,” Changa reflects. “That’s why Dutch makers are so present in this innovation domain, and why we continue to have a strong roster of projects each year.”

Researcher Siuli Ko, also producer and founder of The Hague-based K.O. Productions and responsible for Moonshot Digital Culture, identifies a turning point in production quality. “From the Immerse\Interact programme and the arrival of VR as a medium in its own right, you really see that Dutch projects have elevated. Internationally, the Dutch field is now highly recognised—the quality is high, and it’s really good.”

Absaline Hehakaya, Head of Talent & Experiment at the Netherlands Film Fund, reflects on what she thinks stands out in the Dutch XR scene: “Their distinct outlook on what it means to be human in this day and age. The boldness of the creators has been our strongest asset, in both their openness to a transdisciplinary approach and their willingness to follow to their own intuitions—even if unsettling. We could speak of geniuses, but I prefer the term ‘scenius’ [collective creativity].” 

Today, Dutch immersive works are recognised for their ambition and craft, with a near-constant presence in the line-ups of prestigious international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Cannes Film Festival, SXSW and more.

Working towards a canonThe trajectory of the Dutch immersive scene can perhaps be best traced through a handful of landmark works, that together illustrate its range.

Angels of Amsterdam (2021) by Anna Abrahams and Avinash Changa transports viewers to a 17th-century Amsterdam tavern, using a combination of 3D scanning, high-resolution imagery and embodied storytelling to explore power, labour and gender inequality. The interactive VR work was the first Dutch project in official competition at Venice Film Festival’s VR Expanded programme and was nominated for a Golden Calf (the most prestigious accolades within the Dutch audiovisual sector) the same year.

Eurydice, A Descent into Infinity (2022) by Celine Daemen, a VR opera inspired by the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, blends opera, theatre and virtual reality into a poetic non-linear journey. Premiering at Venice Immersive, the work unfolds in a point-cloud underworld, accompanied by atmospheric compositions that play with sense of scale and the infinite, that invite participants to explore the unknown in a mythical, liminal space.

Premiering at Venice Immersive and nominated for a Golden Calf in 2023, Steye Hallema’s The Imaginary Friend (2023) immerses participants in the intimate world of a grieving child named David. The interactive and cinematic VR experience invites audiences to become the boy’s imaginary companion, engaging directly with his thoughts, anxieties and fantasies through gameplay. The work foregrounds VR’s potential to create deeply personal, emotionally engaged experiences.

Soul Paint (2024) by Sarah Ticho and Niki Smit—an SXSW XR award-winner—merges behavioural science, embodied interaction and expressive 3D drawing. Guided by the question “Where are you feeling?”, users reflect on their inner realities while also encountering the experiences of others through movement and visual expression. The work represents breaking into new territories, where art and healthcare meet.

Marcel van Brakel and Hazal Ertürkan’s Future Botanica (2024) uses augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to let users collaboratively design speculative ecosystems. Produced by Polymorf and Studio Biarritz, premiering at Amsterdam’s IDFA DocLab, the work blends ecological reflection with collaborative worldbuilding, simultaneously an experiment into humanity’s evolving relationship to nature. 

Steye Hallema’s immersive and interactive group experience Ancestors (2025), produced by The Smartphone Orchestra, generates imagined genealogies through participants’ devices, exploring how today’s choices ripple across future generations. Premiering at IDFA DocLab, the project has been shown at SXSW and several other international festivals.

Daniel Ernst’s The Great Orator (2025) presents a nonlinear VR world in which participants explore the consciousness of an AI-induced apparition of a bygone Dutch TV medium. Premiering in competition at Venice Immersive, the work invites viewers to shape their narrative path through interactive exploration of symbolic spaces, blending narrative, memory and ethics in a mutable story environment.

Michel van der Aa’s From Dust (2025), winner of the prestigious Best Immersive Work at Cannes, as part of the Immersive Competition, is a virtual reality opera installation in which AI dynamically invites participants to ‘shape their own story’. Combining electronic soundscapes with the voices of vocal ensemble Sjaella, the work responds to visitors’ presence and choices, redefining opera through immersive storytelling and generative technology.

From Dust - Michel van der Aa

Collaboration as driver
Behind these works lies a vital network of creators, studios and facilitators. Creators and artists such as Daniel Ernst, Celine Daemen and Steye Hallema have helped shape the field artistically, while studios and creative technologists like Studio Biarritz, Polymorf, Monobanda, The Smartphone Orchestra and WeMakeVR provide the technical and conceptual infrastructure to realise complex visions. The pioneering collaborations reach far further, integrating filmmakers, game designers, performers, animators, creative developers, visual artists, composers, audio engineers, lighting experts, researchers, software developers, scientists, healthcare workers and beyond. 

Hehakaya underlines: “These makers are pioneers in all areas of the sector. Their works have human connection at heart, challenging what we can think and feel with technology, taking us on artistic adventures while addressing the big questions of our time.”

Changa notes:

“I would argue this convergence of science and creativity and immersive technology doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world at this level.”

Next to the dynamic constellation of open-minded creative endeavours and technological innovation, the Dutch ecosystem is sustained by early-stage development and festival showcases. At the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), IDFA DocLab has been charting the edges of immersive practice for nearly two decades, and, since 2018, has partnered with MIT on an annual Research & Development Summit that pushes the field’s conceptual and technical questions forward. Together with the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), the Netherlands Film Festival and animation film festival Kaboom, these platforms provide the critical launch infrastructure that propels Dutch projects onto the international stage.

Circulation also includes cultural institutions like Eye Filmmuseum, NXT museum and LIMA. These function as testing grounds and a path to access wider audiences. NU:Reality stands out as a rare organisation actively engaging with the question of distribution and touring of VR works in cinemas, programming VR screenings and collaborating with venues to bring immersive projects to broader audiences.

Funding the field
At the heart of this boom is the decisive influence of stable government funding for immersive and interactive works. Since 2019, the Netherlands Film Fund and the Creative Industries Fund NL have jointly managed the Immerse\Interact Grant Scheme—an annual collaboration to support the development, realisation and distribution of outstanding immersive and interactive media, with recent rounds allocating approximately €1 million to immersive and interactive productions. Since then, they have extended the funding stream with additional budgets, such as the Immerse\Interact-XL grant scheme and the Immerse\Interact Presentation Grant. The Fund also collaborates with IDFA DocLab to grant annual support with the Film Fund DocLab Interactive Grant. 

“We have provided a myriad of ways to support the development, (co-)production and distribution of Dutch XR-works,” Hehakaya reflects on the stability the Fund provides. “We engage multiple perspectives from different stakeholders and experts to assess the projects, combining inter- and transdisciplinary strengths to foster an XR-supportive network.”

Parallel initiatives, such as CIIIC (Creative Industries Immersive Impact Coalition), connect creators with research institutions, industry partners and government bodies.

Funding is widely credited as the scaffolding behind the impetus, elevating both quality and international recognition. Ko reflects: “Government recognition signals a field worth funding. With the injection of capital into the sector, you can directly see how Dutch projects elevated and sector emerged in response.”

Many immersive makers speak about valuing the freedom they have here—to take risks, to experiment with form, to work across disciplines. Hehakaya notes: “We take playfulness seriously, creating conditions where creators and projects can flourish. As a public financier, we are bound to regulations that make us dependable, while keeping tabs on whether or not the rules and ideas that we adhere to are compatible with the games the artists are playing.”

The combination of grants, festival exposure and promotional support from agencies like SEE NL has created a prolific laboratory for immersive and XR.

Roadblocks and what’s in the pipeline?
Despite its momentum, the Dutch immersive field is still developing its infrastructure. The most frequently cited pressure point is distribution. Even as development funding has grown increasingly robust, the pathways for touring, long-term presentation and safeguarding works against rapid technological obsolescence have not kept pace.

“Everybody sees this massive gap in distribution,” Ko notes. “But there is no one who has jumped into it yet, because there’s no business model; the sector isn’t professionalised in that sense.” As a result, many projects remain visible only within short festival cycles—high-impact at premiere, but difficult to access after those moments pass.

Technical capacity forms another part of the bottleneck. Institutions struggle with high presentation costs and limited in-house expertise, while makers point to a lack of trained operators capable of supporting complex installations over sustained periods. 

Complicating matters is the sheer diversity of immersive formats—VR, AR, MR, installation, performance and hybrid spatial experiences—each with their own set of requirements. As Ko puts it: “These works are distinctly innovative; they use new ways of storytelling and technologies. You can’t standardise them like film, and that’s exactly what makes them powerful and expensive at the same time.”

These challenges are echoed in the Moonshot Digital Culture report on the Pilot Vouchers for cultural immersive productions commissioned by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The research highlights a recurring pattern: although aforementioned development funding is relatively well supported, distribution budgets tend to be absorbed by production pressures. The report warns that without structural attention to distribution, “the scene risks remaining in a permanent prototype phase.” Innovation continues, yet the works themselves struggle to secure the institutional stability and longevity—exactly what is needed to form a lasting canon.

Still, practitioners are careful not to frame these issues solely as deficits. For many, they represent the next frontier. Creators and production companies are experimenting with new touring models, and interrogating the value chain itself. As Changa puts it, “The way the value chain works in film is different for immersive. Those models have not been established yet, and the question is: where are those models and who is responsible for creating them?”

The next frontier
Looking ahead, the conversation increasingly turns toward sustainability—of artworks, of infrastructure and of institutional memory. Extending the lifespan of existing works, professionalising distribution pathways, investing in dedicated venues and recognising immersive media as cultural heritage are emerging priorities. Preservation sits at the heart of this shift. “Important works are being made, and they remain relevant,” Ko emphasises. “The question is: how do we preserve them? How do we keep showing them, and break through this festival deadlock?”

Archiving is becoming a parallel strand of innovation. Changa outlines the forthcoming Preservation Module, a custom hardware device created by WeMakeVR and released through IMPRES (The Institute of Immersive Preservation). The system preserves individual VR works onto modules stored within the IMPRES online archive. 

“Years from now, a preserved work can be plugged into a ‘Presentation Unit’, allowing it to be the presented on modern-day VR devices,” he explains, underscoring how preservation can lower technical barriers, enable broader access and extend the lifespan of immersive works. “IMPRES aims to lay the groundwork for immersive media to be treated not as a fleeting technological moment, but as a cultural form with a lasting canon.”

Beyond preservation, practitioners stress the broader societal potential of immersive technologies. “I see immersive as a new language,” Changa reflects. “It’s not solely an arts and culture domain. It has the potential to improve quality of life—how we understand other cultures, how we deal with conflict, provide medical care or work with people suffering from dementia.” 

For Ko, the long-term horizon is clear: if immersive works were to receive incentives comparable to film, the sector could professionalise at scale. Distributors would step in; institutions could plan beyond single seasons and makers would no longer face the recurring cliff edge between premiere and disappearance. 

Considering the future, Hehakaya is most concerned about the AI boom, but remains hopeful: “The Dutch scene is made up of a diverse group of artists who critically assess the technological topics of our times, while creating incredibly fun works in the process. They are tech-savvy and ethically aware, which make me look forward to the years ahead.”

Five years into Dutch immersive innovation, the ambition is not endless acceleration, but consolidation—allowing the field to build a canon, preserve knowledge and let works travel beyond the festival circuit. Looking ahead, the question of the hour is how the Netherlands will continue to lead innovation and shape the conversation on where immersive media can go next.

Find out more about Dutch XR works through the 2026 catalogue.

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Roxy Merrell is a writer, editor and film journalist based in Amsterdam.