Ten years after private investigator Veronica Coltrane first stepped into virtual reality, she’s back. New Canvas, Jacaranda Productions and PICO today announced COLTRANE, a five-episode, virtual reality, noir series starring AACTA Award winner Diana Glenn as Veronica Coltrane. Glenn also serves as a producer on the series, which expands the world first introduced in the pioneering 2016 title VR NOIR: A DAY BEFORE THE NIGHT and launches in Q4 2026. The evolution of this story world is being driven by a close creative and technical collaboration between the co-production partners. COLTRANE combines live-action performance with real-time immersive environments, enabling Glenn’s performance and the world of COLTRANE to inhabit the viewer’s physical space.
The co-production brings together New Canvas’ award-winning, immersive storytelling experience, Jacaranda Productions’ film, television and theater pedigree and PICO’s creative and production expertise. Together, the three companies are building COLTRANE as an ambitious new chapter for the character and the world first introduced in VR NOIR. Coltrane represents a shared creative and technical effort to build a premium, episodic, story world unlike anything else experienced to date in immersive entertainment.
Set in Hong Kong, COLTRANE places audiences inside the perspective of disgraced former SFPD detective Veronica Coltrane, now a private investigator whose surveillance assignment pulls her into a conspiracy where memory, perception and truth can’t always be trusted.
Across five approximately 15-minute episodes, Glenn portrays COLTRANE while audiences experience the story from within the character’s perspective, blurring the line between viewer and protagonist as her investigation unfolds around them. The series launches in English and Mandarin later this year.
“Veronica can’t always trust what she remembers, what she sees or even her own instincts and neither can the audience. That’s what makes COLTRANE so exciting to me. This format lets us put the viewer inside that uncertainty, where their own biases and emotional responses become part of how they experience the story,” said Diana Glenn, lead actor and producer. “Navigating a world where memory and perception are unreliable gives us this extraordinary opportunity to make that uncertainty personal. As an actor, that changes the relationship between performer and audience. As a producer, it’s exactly the kind of storytelling frontier I want to explore.”
COLTRANE builds on VR NOIR, originally developed by Start VR and released in 2016 as part of Vivid Sydney’s official program. An early experiment in bringing cinematic storytelling, interactivity and audience agency together in virtual reality, VR NOIR placed viewers inside the role of Veronica Coltrane through a combination of live-action performance, immersive environments and interactive choices.
VR NOIR went on to rack up more than 500,000 downloads on Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard and earned a Most Innovative VR nomination at the 2016 Proto Awards. UploadVR called it “a great example of how virtual reality will change television.”
VR NOIR would also become part of the creative foundation for New Canvas. In 2020, producer Nathan Anderson spun Start Beyond’s entertainment division into the independent studio, bringing its slate of immersive entertainment titles, including VR Noir, into New Canvas. The new company was built around a focus Anderson had been pursuing since the earliest days of consumer VR: finding new ways to bring cinematic storytelling, game design and interactivity together.
“When we released VR NOIR in 2016, I described my career quest as finding the convergence of storytelling, game design and interactivity. Ten years later, that’s still the quest, but the creative canvas has expanded enormously. With COLTRANE, we can take what we began exploring then and go much further, putting audiences inside Veronica’s perspective while bringing her performance and her world into their own. It feels like both a continuation of where we started and a glimpse of where immersive storytelling can go next,” said Nathan Anderson, New Canvas Co-Founder and Coltrane Showrunner.
The partnership reflects a shared ambition among New Canvas, Jacaranda Productions and PICO to push extended reality beyond novelty and demonstrate its potential as a medium for sophisticated, character-driven entertainment. By combining cinematic performance, interactive storytelling and spatial technology, the partners are building COLTRANE around something fundamental to the format: the audience isn’t simply watching Veronica’s story. They’re stepping inside it.
The series is executive produced by Sarah Goodes and Diana Glenn from Jacaranda Productions, Matt Hermans from Electric Lens Co, Zareh Nalbandian and Toby Nalbandian from Truant Pictures and Nathan Anderson and Wadooah Wali for New Canvas.
