The selection is complete for the Virtual Reality works of the 78th Venice International Film Festival. The Venice VR Expanded will again be held online September 1-19. From September 1-11 the Venice VR Expanded Program will be available on site for accredited festival guests, at the VR Gallery in the Palazzo del Casinò (Lido di Venezia), Sala Amici, upon reservation.
The Official Selection of Virtual Reality works in this edition of the Venice Film Festival may be viewed online thanks to our partner platforms, HTC’s Viveport and Facebook’s Oculus, using PCVR and Oculus Quest headsets.
The Venice VR virtual world, designed with the technical support of VRrOOm within VRChat, will be the Venice VR Expanded hub—a fantastical virtual version of Venice and of our usual in-real-life VR Island Lazzaretto Vecchio, available to anyone with a VRChat account. Within our Venice VR virtual world, visitors can experience previews of the official selection and socialise with other visitors.
Accredited guests will be invited to Meet the Creator sessions, opening and closing parties, and other performances and events. Within this virtual world, following the success of the 2020 virtual edition, Venice VR Expanded will feature a new section, the Venice VRChat Worlds Gallery, with a selection of 35 virtual worlds, celebrating the creativity of creators using VRChat as a platform to build their own fantasy worlds.
The Venice International Film Festival was one of the first film festivals in the world to demonstrate interest in Virtual Reality. The development of a VR Theater in 2016 sparked enormous interest among the participants of the Venice Production Bridge. Starting in 2017, La Biennale di Venezia launched the first competition for works in Virtual Reality in an A-list festival, which was held for three editions, through 2019, in a venue on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio on the Lido, judged by an International Jury. The online accessibility of Venice VR Expanded, born in the 2020 edition, represents a new commitment and a new challenge to guarantee that the Venice International Film Festival will continue to offer the experience of the rapidly evolving art form that is Virtual Reality.
The accredited viewers of the Venice Film Festival will have access to all the titles of the virtual program. Furthermore, a special VR Accreditation will be issued to interested visitors who are not accredited for the Festival.