Beldocs XR Academy is an intense 3 days program for artists, directors and creative minds that are interested in exploring the emerging realm of immersive storytelling. With a focus on VR and 360° video the XR Academy is a unique opportunity to develop ideas through a creative approach to immersive technology. The intense 3 days program offers space for creativity, knowledge transfer and networking with the goal to offer to the participant a fruitful and enriching learning experience.
Workshops, lectures and one to one mentoring will provide the participants with the basic theoretical and practical techniques in order to take their project a step forward into development. Beldocs XR Academy provides possibility for the authors to get feedback from experts as well as to find partners for further development of their projects.
XR Academy Projects 2025
Anthrome
Director: Sylvia Rybak, Marco Winter, Ula Sowa Przybylska
Country: Poland, Germany
Anthrome mirrors the archetypal dream of exit to a new Eden: a terra incognita unspoiled by modernity, its societal and economic constraints, and ecological costs. Inspired by experiments like Biosphere 2, the project explores symbols of utopian ambition, which ultimately fail under their own constraints. The notion of an enclosed biosphere recalls the etymological origins of ‘paradise’ as a walled garden fenced off from a sinful world. It mirrors contemporary techno-utopian visions, where the curation of resources and environments promises transcendence, embracing an ethos of peak lifestyle performance for a selected few. Constructed as an ultra-smooth realtime digital garden, the audiovisual installation evolves as data from the physical world gradually bleeds into its perfected artificiality
Original language: No Dialogue
Length: loop
Expected date of delivery : 01/12/2025
Contact details: u.tiruriru@gmail.com
CHOICES∞
Director: Au Matt
Country: Poland/South Korea
„choices∞“ is a VR/XR queer murder mystery that immerses you in a looping narrative of violence against queer bodies. You enter this world as an avatar, navigating a fragmented landscape shaped by memory, fantasy, and loss. The question is not who committed the murder, but whether the cycle can be broken. Each choice you make fractures reality, sending you down shifting paths. The story accelerates. Time collapses. The boundaries between past and present, victim and perpetrator blur. This world is built out of 3D scans of bodies and environments, crafted from our fantasies and imaginations surrounding death and burial. Avatars are based on real people and personal stories they shared.
The choices you make are not about solving a murder—but about taming death and reclaiming it in this digital grieving space. “
Original language: English
Length: 30 min
Expected date of delivery : 06/01/2026
Contact details: au.matt@me.com
Imagine Farewell Station
Director: Aristotelis Maragkos
Country: Greece
IMAGINE FAREWELL STATION is an interactive VR experience merging text-to-image AI generation with narrative immersion. In a future where memories exist only as words, users navigate a memory-reconstruction machine, selecting and tearing floating notes to trigger evolving visual memories. Guided by a narrator, they reconstruct the unstable memory of a love story lost to time. As emotional words emerge, the AI struggles, revealing the limits of machine-made recollection.
The user’s actions shape the story’s outcome, confronting the tension between memory, language, and authenticity. /Imagine Farewell Station is a meditation on memory’s erosion, the failures of technology to capture emotion, and the human need to believe in imagined pasts and futures.
Original language: English
Length: 25 mins
Expected date of delivery: 28/01/2026
Contact details: aristotelis.m@gmail.com
The Ripple Effect
Director: Ani Mardoyan
Country: Armenia
„The Ripple Effect“ is a dynamic, immersive VR experience designed specifically for adolescents aged 12 to 16. It places the participant in the heart of a realistic school environment, where social dynamics unfold and their own choices directly influence the narrative. The experience begins in a virtual school hallway and guides the user toward a classroom where a tense bullying situation is occurring. Initially invisible, the participant witnesses a group of students harassing a peer. As the scene develops, the user is gradually given the opportunity to interact with the situation—choosing whether to intervene, support the bullied student, ignore the incident, or even side with the aggressors. Each decision triggers a unique path and leads to vividly animated 360° sequences that reveal the long-term psychological consequences of those actions, both for the victim and for the bystander. This single-user journey aims to foster empathy, self-reflection, and emotional intelligence. After the VR session, a guided discussion with a sociologist-psychologist helps participants process the experience, reflect on their decisions, and better understand the impact of social behavior in real life. By simulating real emotional and ethical dilemmas, The Ripple Effect encourages adolescents to recognize their role in shaping healthier, more compassionate communities.
Original language: English
Length: 10-15 minutes
Expected date of delivery: 07/12/2026
Contact details: pikarset@gmail.com
Beldocs Industry Days program is supported by the European Union through Creative Europe MEDIA.
