Red Sea Immersive (2021)

The Red Sea Immersive plaza in VRChat. Avatars mill around a floating "VRChat Worlds Collection" cube, in front of poster walls marked In Competition and Out of Competition, under a festival billboard for 6 to 15 December 2021.

Red Sea Immersive was the VR programme of the first Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah. It ran from 7 to 15 December 2021 at Hayy Jameel, Art Jameel's creative complex, and was curated by Liz Rosenthal (who also curates Venice Immersive). Thirteen VR works competed for the Golden Yusr. Eight more were shown out of competition, and one of those was the VRChat Worlds Collection.

We built a collection of VRChat worlds for the programme, so people could meet up in avatar, browse the line-up on the poster walls and hop between worlds together.

So a shared VRChat world sat in the same line-up as The Book of Distance and Mare, picked by the curator of Venice's VR section. In 2021, most festival VR was watched alone, one headset at a time. Social VR in the official programme of a new international festival was still unusual.

Role

VR worldbuilding and production. Worldbuild.io was still called Team Epic back then. Big ups to the whole crew.

What It Led To

The same year, two of my VRChat worlds were in competition at Venice VR Expanded: Spirit of Place and Bliss in the Ear of a Storm.

And Red Sea was an early run at the job I've done for Venice Immersive's VRChat gallery since 2024: give a festival a place people can share. Those three Venice worlds have had more than 145,000 visits between them (as of October 2026).

Role

What It Led To

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