I interviewed Emissive / Excurio co-founder and CEO Fabien Barati at Laval Virtual 2023 after having tried the free-roaming Immersive Expedition edition of Éternelle Notre-Dame, which was really quite incredible. I originally saw the sit-down version of Éternelle Notre-Dame at Venice Immersive 2022, but the free-roaming, immersive expedition version was such a distinctly different experience that felt like I was going on a proper adventure. Here's a showreel of Excurio's immersive expeditions that includes Horizon of Khufu, Tonight with the Impressionists, Paris 1874, Eternal Notre-Dame, and Life Chronicles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUoOzBYQ1cM

Emissive / Excurio had their Un Soir Avec Les Impressionnistes, Paris 1874 immersive expedition experience in competition for Venice Immersive 2024, and so I wanted to publish this unpublished interview from my archive backlog because their immersive expedition LBE experiences are really taking the immersive industry world by storm from France to China to Canada and beyond. They're able to put over 100 people per hour through their experiences, and over a hundred thousand over the period of months for some of their runs. There was certainly a buzz around how successful of a model this has been on both the creation of IP but also for the third-party exhibitors who are managing the on-site logistics. Hopefully this archival interview provides a bit more context for how these immersive expeditions have been developing as it was certainly a hot topic amongst folks during the festival who are thinking about the challenges of distribution, throughput, and finding sustainable models that have the promise of growing the XR industry.

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Music: Fatality