PXR2026
Schedule

Join us for the opening night of PXR2026! 

Discover hybrid XR experiences, get hype about this year’s programming, try out a headset, and socialize with attendees from across Canada & the globe.

Come meet us at a Hub or jump into a VR headset at home to start exploring!

US BENEATH THE CURRENTS

Sarah Hin Ching U

HUBS EXCLUSIVE

Us Beneath the Currents is an  augmented reality (AR) performance-installation , inspired by humans’ remarkable capacity to adapt to changing environments.  This AR project utilizes real-time full body tracking technology where viewers can access the AR experience from their mobile devices, witnessing live performers dancing with their 3D digital avatars. This project is powered by Gennee.AR, a free, web-page site.

TRIADIC MUTUALISM

Ove Holmqvist

HUBS EXCLUSIVE

Triadic Mutualism is a participatory telematic performance that links three venues into a shared musical improvisation. Using physical computing and affective computing, the work senses movement, stillness, proximity, and synchrony inside a projected field, then translates those collective signals into musical changes that are heard locally and echoed remotely. Each venue develops its own motif and momentum, while network coupling lets shifts in one city nudge the others, creating cycles of alignment, tension, and release. There is no controller or fixed score. Participants learn the rules by moving, listening, and adjusting.

VRCHAT DJ DANCE PARTY

Dance the night away with friends from across realities as OkGold spins epic tracks and Swiftp conjures visuals to melt your mind. 

Get tickets:

ONLINE  | VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO

Our custom VRChat world build asks you to pace yourself as you traverse frozen tundras, discover cities with dying light, and look for your new home in a fractured realm. 

Adrienne Wong’s work straddles theatrical and digital space. She has performed in former morgues, current science centres, art galleries in the middle of the night, and at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Web projects include The Apology Generator, which earned her the inaugural Artist in Residence position on CBC Radio’s Q, and SadSongs.ca, commissioned by Nightswimming Theatre in Toronto. Other radio work includes writing, performing in and directing plays, and contributing to North by Northwest and The Afternoon Show, all out of CBC Radio Vancouver. Landline (created with Dustin Harvey) is a performance for audio recording and SMS that toured nationally and internationally for five years. Me On The Map (created with JD (Jan) Derbyshire) is a kids show about urban planning and collective decision-making, received a Jessie Richardson Theatre Award nomination in Vancouver and was selected for the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity 2017 Playwrights Colony. Adrienne’s writing has been published in Canadian Theatre Review, CdnTimes, and the anthology Asian Canadian Theatre. Adrienne was Artistic Producer at Neworld Theatre in Vancouver until 2013, where she commissioned and produced 11 “podplays” in partnership with Playwrights Theatre Centre and Martin King. Currently, she is Artistic Producer of SWS Performance, Festival Director of the Festival of Live Digital Art (FOLDA), and also co-edits the SWS online magazine CdnTimes. Now living in Banff, Alberta, Adrienne holds a BFA from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts.

Journey through Uncanny Lounge, a VRChat world where music becomes a living, playable architecture. Co-created with MetaRick, this surreal, color-rich experience lets players interact with layered music systems that respond in real time. From a harmonically-safe Chord Sync Manager to a fully functional step sequencer Beat Grid, every aspect is designed to be joyful, intuitive, and impossible to make sound bad. After exploring the world together, participants will enter a “classroom void” where the systems are broken down and demystified. Created in close collaboration with ChatGPT over hundreds of hours and 45 custom scripts, this project showcases what’s now possible when AI and imagination meet. The result is both a technical showcase and a creative provocation—perfect for anyone dreaming of building the impossible in VRChat, especially on Quest.

Gh0st, a cyberpunk computer-whiz, races against the clock to lead a group of escaped detainees and her increasingly sentient Service-Bot, Atom, to freedom through a hacked portal, before the fascistic corporation that controls Uncanny Alley can erase their memories using experimental Radio Frequency technology. The gang must evade capture and decide whether to leave their beloved digital city and start a new life in the open metaverse or stay and fight for their freedom, and their home.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO | ONLINE

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

Symbiosis/Dysbiosis is a multi-sensory experience. Wearing EEG bands, players are invited to slow down and work together as they enter an interconnected, psychedelic forest shaped by real-time bioelectrical data from both participants and living mycelium. Live performers appear remotely as characters within the environment, interacting with players through narrative and improvisation. This theatrical layer merges with the living soundscape composed in collaboration with the locally cultivated fungi housed inside a terrarium at the installation’s core. Electrodes embedded in the fungus connect to a custom synthesizer and to VR. The fungi responds sonically, visually, and through a scent emitter.

Symbiosis/Dysbiosis is a live performance, a collaborative experience with more-than-human beings, and a reminder that our future depends on recognizing our deep entanglement with the shared environment.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO | ONLINE

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

Forest Wild XR embodies a vision of immersive social space rooted in memory, empathy, embodiment, and collective meaning rather than spectacle. Drawing from lived experience, ecological metaphor, and interdisciplinary collaboration, the project transforms wildfire into an emotional landscape, one that holds grief, mental health, resilience, and renewal simultaneously. It is a project that combines the strength and grace of dance choreography with the sensitivity of a personal story using technology to express emotions.

By working across XR, movement, and sound, our team bridged collaborators from dance, music, and immersive media to create a cohesive, poetic whole. The result is a prototype for what future social platforms could be, spaces designed for empathy, co-authorship, and regeneration. Forest Wild XR asks not how immersive worlds can entertain us, but how they might help us remember what it means to belong in a world thrown into chaos.

Dedicated time to play, explore, and connect with folks in a custom world built for PXR2026!

Why have domes captured our imagination for millenia? From the firmament, to the planetariums accompanying the space race, to the Las Vegas sphere, we can’t seem to stop thinking about (and indeed building) domes.

In this presentation, we will explore dome architectures, asking what these spaces promise and what they demand. We will investigate how domes produce immersion and virtuality differently from theatres, projection mapped spaced, and VR headsets. And drawing on theory, history, and artistic practice, we will reflect on how domes might be engaged critically and creatively today, offering practical considerations for designing work that acknowledges the power, limits, and responsibilities of this totalizing medium.

Join us in the virtual dome as we consider the dome. 

Symbiosis/Dysbiosis is a multi-sensory experience. Wearing EEG bands, players are invited to slow down and work together as they enter an interconnected, psychedelic forest shaped by real-time bioelectrical data from both participants and living mycelium. Live performers appear remotely as characters within the environment, interacting with players through narrative and improvisation. This theatrical layer merges with the living soundscape composed in collaboration with the locally cultivated fungi housed inside a terrarium at the installation’s core. Electrodes embedded in the fungus connect to a custom synthesizer and to VR. The fungi responds sonically, visually, and through a scent emitter.

Symbiosis/Dysbiosis is a live performance, a collaborative experience with more-than-human beings, and a reminder that our future depends on recognizing our deep entanglement with the shared environment.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO | ONLINE

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

Gh0st, a cyberpunk computer-whiz, races against the clock to lead a group of escaped detainees and her increasingly sentient Service-Bot, Atom, to freedom through a hacked portal, before the fascistic corporation that controls Uncanny Alley can erase their memories using experimental Radio Frequency technology. The gang must evade capture and decide whether to leave their beloved digital city and start a new life in the open metaverse or stay and fight for their freedom, and their home.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO | ONLINE

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

Us Beneath the Currents is an  augmented reality (AR) performance-installation , inspired by humans’ remarkable capacity to adapt to changing environments. This AR project utilizes real-time full body tracking technology where viewers can access the AR experience from their mobile devices, witnessing live performers dancing with their 3D digital avatars. This project is powered by Gennee.AR, a free, web-page site.

Triadic Mutualism is a participatory telematic performance that links three venues into a shared musical improvisation. Using physical computing and affective computing, the work senses movement, stillness, proximity, and synchrony inside a projected field, then translates those collective signals into musical changes that are heard locally and echoed remotely. Projected visuals guide participation and are controlled by both present and remote groups. They are not decorative. They function as an interaction surface and an active component of the music generation, making musical structure visible and offering clear opportunities to intervene. Bio-informed pacing treats shifts in activation and recovery as meaningful cues, shaping intensity, density, and stability over time. Each venue develops its own motif and momentum, while network coupling lets shifts in one city nudge the others, creating cycles of alignment, tension, and release. There is no controller or fixed score. Participants learn the rules by moving, listening, and adjusting.

Feeling stressed about the implications of AI on creative industries? You aren’t alone! 

Bring your questions, vents, frustrations, curiosities, for conversations with a human-first approach to navigating the quickly evolving AI landscape in a cozy corner (and yes, there’s snacks).

AWAKE & STILL DROWNING is a hands-on, mixed-reality performance about climate change, place, and collective movement. Audience members become part of a flock of seabirds attempting to cross the rapidly flooding Chignecto Isthmus—the narrow land bridge connecting Nova Scotia to mainland Canada.

Guided by quiet narration, hand-drawn text, and a bird companion, participants move together through a shifting landscape as the water rises around them. The experience is physical and shared: you walk, pause, adjust, and respond in real time as you navigate the space alongside others.

By turning viewers into participants, AWAKE & STILL DROWNING invites audiences to feel the urgency of environmental change not as a distant issue, but as something lived, collective, and unfolding in the present. The work received the Best Immersive Experience Award at the 2025 Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF) in Mexico.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

Fireside chat with creatives on the cutting edge of theatre education and XR. Bring your practical questions, curiosities, and learn more about how to extend the realities of your work

Meet the team behind the execution of the incredible worlds of PXR2026. Take a look under the hood and learn how they pulled it off.

Joshua is so ready for your sound design questions, Reza can’t wait to nerd out with you over design concepts, and Myles & Cole will tell you how to put it all together.

Take a look at the technical and creative process and challenges of translating a play written for the theatre but containing prominent staged VR scenes into a hybrid corporeal-digital experience. Discover new techniques and approaches for translating works into hybrid and virtual mediums and discuss the ethics and responsibilities of creating immersive work that actively centralizes audiences.

Symbiosis/Dysbiosis is a multi-sensory experience. Wearing EEG bands, players are invited to slow down and work together as they enter an interconnected, psychedelic forest shaped by real-time bioelectrical data from both participants and living mycelium. Live performers appear remotely as characters within the environment, interacting with players through narrative and improvisation. This theatrical layer merges with the living soundscape composed in collaboration with the locally cultivated fungi housed inside a terrarium at the installation’s core. Electrodes embedded in the fungus connect to a custom synthesizer and to VR. The fungi responds sonically, visually, and through a scent emitter.

Symbiosis/Dysbiosis is a live performance, a collaborative experience with more-than-human beings, and a reminder that our future depends on recognizing our deep entanglement with the shared environment.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO | ONLINE

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

AWAKE & STILL DROWNING is a hands-on, mixed-reality performance about climate change, place, and collective movement. Audience members become part of a flock of seabirds attempting to cross the rapidly flooding Chignecto Isthmus—the narrow land bridge connecting Nova Scotia to mainland Canada.

Guided by quiet narration, hand-drawn text, and a bird companion, participants move together through a shifting landscape as the water rises around them. The experience is physical and shared: you walk, pause, adjust, and respond in real time as you navigate the space alongside others.

By turning viewers into participants, AWAKE & STILL DROWNING invites audiences to feel the urgency of environmental change not as a distant issue, but as something lived, collective, and unfolding in the present. The work received the Best Immersive Experience Award at the 2025 Guanajuato International Film Festival (GIFF) in Mexico.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

Gh0st, a cyberpunk computer-whiz, races against the clock to lead a group of escaped detainees and her increasingly sentient Service-Bot, Atom, to freedom through a hacked portal, before the fascistic corporation that controls Uncanny Alley can erase their memories using experimental Radio Frequency technology. The gang must evade capture and decide whether to leave their beloved digital city and start a new life in the open metaverse or stay and fight for their freedom, and their home.

GET TICKETS NOW:

VANCOUVER | KINGSTON | TORONTO | ONLINE

General Admission is FREE for Pass Holders, up to venue capacity limit.

Join us for discourse on the future of XR & performance.

The XRtist Link-Up is a professional intensive for emerging artists in Canada who are studying performance, music, architecture, game design, creative writing, and other related disciplines at the post-secondary level. Together, the cohort has developed and created two short virtual reality experiences.

Acakosuk — a retelling of indigenous stories created in collaboration with indigenous youth.

Snow Scramble — a child’s whimsy and escapism leads you to a wondrous snowy world.

Join us for conference reflections, connections, and to say goodbye to PXR2026!