Red Sea Immersive
A new film festival in Jeddah put a shared VRChat world in its VR programme. Worldbuild built it.
Case study
A festival people could share.
- Client
- Red Sea International Film Festival
- Year
- 2021
- Role
- VR worldbuilding and production, as Team Epic
- Platform
- VRChat
The brief
Red Sea Immersive was the VR programme of the first Red Sea International Film Festival. It ran from 7 to 15 December 2021 at Hayy Jameel, Art Jameel's creative complex in Jeddah, curated by Liz Rosenthal.
In 2021 most festival VR was watched alone, one headset at a time.
The approach
- A world collection
A collection of VRChat worlds, shown out of competition as the VRChat Worlds Collection.
- Poster walls
People met up in avatar and browsed the line-up on poster walls.
- Hopping together
Groups could move between worlds together.
The outcome
A shared VRChat world sat in the same line-up as The Book of Distance and Mare. Social VR in the official programme of a new international festival was still unusual.
The same year, Spirit of Place and Bliss in the Ear of a Storm were in competition at Venice VR Expanded.
Red Sea was an early run at the job Worldbuild has 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 VRChat visits between them, as of October 2026.
- VR works in competition for the Golden Yusr
- 13
- shown out of competition, the VRChat Worlds Collection among them
- 8
Sources: the Red Sea Film Festival press release of 17 November 2021, Hayy Jameel, and vrcw.net for visit counts.
Credits
- VR worldbuilding and production
- Team Epic now Worldbuild.io
- Curator
- Liz Rosenthal
- For
- Red Sea International Film Festival
The record
The festival's press release and Hayy Jameel's programme page are public.
To talk to Worldbuild about the world, write to Dale.