Venice Immersive Announces 2025 Competition Line-Up

Venice Immersive returns once more next month, featuring nearly 70 XR projects from dozens of countries.

Running annually since 2017, Venice Immersive is the XR segment for the 82nd Venice International Film Festival. This includes 30 projects in this year’s competition up for three awards, with this year’s judges being writer and director Eliza McNitt (Spheres), producer Gwenael François, and Boris Labbé (Ito Meikyū).

For 2025, Venice Immersive’s competition projects feature the surrealist Face Jumping by Stranger Things VR developer Tender Claws. Asteroid by the Bourne Identity director, Doug Liman, is also debuting, and Variety reports this is coming to “Google’s XR app” later this year. Whether it’s being shown on an Android XR headset like Samsung’s headset is currently unclear.

Other notable entrants in this year’s competition include four projects from publisher Astrea, who previously brought us Mobile Suit Gundam: Silver Phantom and Astra. Two of these are world premieres with ‘Eddie and I’ and ‘The Sad Story Of The Little Mouse Who Wanted To Become Somebody,’ which are joined by ‘The Exploding Girl VR’ and ‘Less Than 5gr Of Saffron.’

Outside the competition, Venice Immersive is also highlighting several released games and projects we’ve previously covered. Highlights include Ghost Town by Fireproof Games, One True Path by InnerspaceVR, Submerged on Apple Vision Pro, The Midnight Walk, VRChat experience Yorutouge, The Reality of Hope documentary, and Wall Town Wonders. You can find the full project list here for more details.

Venice Immersive 2025 will be held on Lazzaretto Vecchio from August 27 to September 6. You can find our full impressions of last year’s festival below.

Everything We Saw At Venice Immersive 2024

Venice Immersive returned once more, and we went hands-on with various VR and AR projects. Here’s everything we saw.