Given the current economic tensions and geopolitical context, dependence on Big Tech in all sectors has never been more apparent. XR is no exception: creators, producers and distributors rely heavily on these technologies, whether for software, hardware or infrastructure. But what kind of dependence are we really talking about? Are there any viable alternatives to this dependency? XR professionals share their visions and explore possible paths to emancipation.
Cover: A-Reality 2008-2013 / Adelin Schweitzer (deletere)
Associated with Donald Trump’s governance, the big American Tech companies – X and Meta in particular – are the focus of tensions. Symbols of neo-imperialism – what some describe as techno-feudalism – these companies are the target of calls for boycotts. More broadly, the domination of Big Tech (GAFAM on the American side and BATX on the Chinese side) raises crucial issues of interference (e.g. within political bodies) and data security…. and even, dare we say it, censorship, when access to these digital tools could be conditioned to the goodwill of these digital giants. In the field of XR, these questions are particularly acute, given that most of the software and hardware comes from American players. The vast majority of designers (artists, studios) and producers use two game engines with proprietary licenses, originally developed for gaming but now used in various fields (entertainment, construction, aerospace and military…). On the one hand, there’s Unreal Engine, published by Epic Games, an American company; on the other, there’s Unity, originally a Danish company, now under the American flag. There are also other engines, such as the one developed by Apple for the Apple visio Pro headset, and open source solutions like Godot Engine. Other U.S.-based solutions commonly used by creative professionals include TouchDesigner (a Canadian company), which enables real-time generation of visuals interacting with sound or sensor data; Max or Ableton Live; or Adobe Creative Clou, which offers high-performance 3D and texturing tools (especially since the acquisition of French company Allegorithmic), etc… Although some solutions are available as open-source software, such as Blender, which seems to be making inroads into the market (as witnessed by the now Oscar-winning Flow – co-produced by Sacrebleu Productions, also winner of the latest Venice Immersive with Ito Meikyu), the first observation is clear: the vast majority of software on offer is owned by US companies and available under proprietary licenses.
Dependence on technology bricks and hardware…
The power of software publishers lies, in part, in their ability to federate user communities and offer a coherent technological ecosystem. Thanks to complementary building blocks – code libraries, frameworks, plug-ins – available as open source or at attractive prices, these companies encourage creation and accelerate development. For Maxime Touroute, artist and developer of software dedicated to digital creation, freeing oneself from proprietary engines and software is a feasible option, but comes at a prohibitive financial cost. On the other hand, he believes it “makes no sense to deprive ourselves of low-level tools that are used for absolutely everything and offer an immense creative palette.” An opinion shared by Amaury La Burthe, partner at Tiny Planets, ex-founder of Novelab studio and co-initiator of CEPIR (case study for responsible immersive design): “Libraries for sound spatialization or controller management, among a thousand other things, provide indispensable functionalities for developers. They save precious time by limiting development and debugging work, an essential comfort for creators of XR works who can’t be everywhere at once.”
As far as XR equipment is concerned, the market is today largely dominated by a few international firms – Meta, Google and Apple, and a few challengers such as Pico and HTC. These players not only control the distribution of content via their headsets, but also participate in their production. “Dependency often stems from the fact that GAFAMs finance content to reinforce their own ecosystem: when a manufacturer invests in a film or a game, it’s logical that they expect exclusivity, even temporarily,” explains Paul Mezier, co-founder of Acute Immersive, a streaming platform dedicated to immersive video. Meta recently relaxed its policy, opening up its catalog to more content not directly financed. A decision that has shaken up the industry: “As a result of these new orientations, many studios accustomed to producing with such funding have had to reduce their teams, or even close down,” testifies Paul Mezier. This domination by hardware giants, who practice vertical integration by diversifying their activities, raises the question of the dependence of XR players. “With a community of 3 billion profiles and virtually unlimited marketing funds, Meta is capturing users’ attention and imposing their technologies in the long term”, says Charles-Henri Marraud des Grottes, XR specialist and founder of MIZIK, a platform that combines virtual reality and karaoke (see the XRMust dossier on the Musicverse).
What investments should be made in infrastructure?
Generally speaking, dependence also applies to digital infrastructures such as servers, cloud solutions and so on… A subject that doesn’t just concern XR, and is becoming increasingly important with the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which requires energy and new storage space. But can we really stand up to the likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Apple? Charles-Henri Marraud des Grottes believes that Europe has undoubtedly chosen the wrong battle-horse: “There has been too much regulation, which has slowed down innovation and investment in infrastructures and ecosystems. Europe has preferred to bet massively on metaverse applications without understanding that it’s not the graphic design that counts.” The question of infrastructure is far from negligible, given the scale of the investments involved (the figure of 109 billion euros was put forward in France at the Summit for Action on AI in 2025).
Conversely, according to Grégory Chatonsky, this focus on infrastructure reveals “a technocratic approach that favors the quantitative over the qualitative. This vision, which can be described as the “big car syndrome”, neglects the social and cultural dimensions of technological innovation. It reflects an imaginary of power that echoes other technological fields, where the race for performance takes precedence over the relevance of uses.” Calling for a policy in favor of authors, the Franco-Canadian artist, takes the question of investment in the opposite direction. “Instead of investing massively in infrastructure, France could develop an ecosystem favoring social and cultural experimentation. This would involve creating residencies for artist-researchers in AI, supporting experimental projects on a human scale, and developing hybrid training programs combining art and technology. This approach would also make it possible to invest in fundamental research into more efficient and ecologically responsible AI models“, an analysis of AI that can easily be transposed to the XR and echoes the deep conviction of Mourad Bennacer, head of artistic development at SAT in Montreal: ”Digital art artists are the beta testers of societal technological change. By hijacking tools, they offer new perspectives. Their reflections still find their way into public debate some years later.”
Encouraging open-source and the creation of commons
Despite this state of affairs, designers still have a free hand; a margin for manoeuvre that sometimes allows them to move towards open-source alternatives. Of course, it’s not a question of systematically pitting proprietary software against open-source solutions: “EPIC, with Unreal Engine, adopts a very open stance. Its engine is regularly updated, and access to it is easy for artists and creators, who only pay for the license after the first million dollars in sales,” points out Amaury La Burthe. In contrast, Unity recently sparked a wave of indignation within its community following controversial pricing decisions linked to its financialization strategy (source). On the other hand, the open-source ecosystem stands out for its committed community, which acts as a regulator, a safeguard against possible excesses and, ultimately, frees itself from the logic of national belonging. Mourad Bennacer defends a collaborative vision and the importance of building commons: “the aim is not to impose open-source tools on artists, but to offer a toolbox, reflect on a work ethic and value collective intelligence.”
The SAT, in collaboration with Sporobole, is piloting a research program based on AI applied to the cultural and creative industries. “The main idea is to identify artistic needs and uses, and then find ways of meeting those needs. When it comes to hardware, for example, we’ll certainly have to look for alternatives using less energy-intensive models that can run on raspberries,” comments Marek Blottière, innovation project manager at SAT. As another example of pooling, “We could imagine pooling computing power with certain structures to free ourselves from the cloud computing solutions of Big Tech”. In Europe, initiatives such as Kyutai are also working on open-source AI solutions applicable to the CCI sector. More generally, other leading institutions and events such as the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, and the Impakt festival in Utrecht, Netherlands, are committed to open-source artistic solutions.
Developing customized tools
Finally – and perhaps the most radical solution to emancipation – some artists choose to create their own tools. Following in the footsteps of Adelin Schweitzer (A-reality ;#Alphaloop), renowned for his technological detour criticizing the techno-solutionist ideology of The Sutherland Test (his next performance in progress), twenty spectators are invited to experience the BUD (Black Up Display), a multi-sensory optical occlusion prosthesis entirely fabricated by the artist. Stéphane Buellet and Arnaud Juracek are also committed to developing their own software, first with Chevalvert (between 2016 and 2024) and since 2025 with the Machines studio. Other artists are making this radical choice, like Maxime Touroute, who justifies the benefits of such a decision: “On most of the creative or mediation projects I’ve worked on, using a turnkey or no-code tool was not viable in the long term. These are tools designed for uses other than creation in a digital environment, and in the end we often end up hacking them“. A cascade of problems follows. First of all, it’s rarely in a publisher’s interest to maintain software for a niche use case, so creators become dependent on software updates. “Big Tech’s vendor lock-in strategy makes works dependent on these tools, and that poses an existential risk,” explains Maxime Touroute, who has found himself developing custom software for projects/works and ensuring its maintenance and longevity.” His two software programs, Revy, a solution for creating all types of AR and mixed-reality projects (mediation, creation, museography, heritage…) and Live Maker, for using smartphones as a medium for real-time interaction, are thus regularly updated. “I have neither the budget nor the time to develop tailor-made solutions for each project, so I decided to design reusable software and pool it across different projects to break down costs and facilitate creative innovation and usage,” he explains.
Indeed, creating tools “from scratch” requires considerable resources, both in terms of skills and time. Funded by the City of Montreal and the Province of Quebec, as part of Quebec’s Digital Cultural Plan, the SAT’s Satellite project in Montreal, an open-source multi-platform metaverse, is a case in point. “The story of Satellite began during Covid. We wanted to create a continuity of physical space with virtual space, exploring this idea of hybridity… On the research side, it was SAT’s innovation department (formerly Metalab) that began identifying open source tools to explore artists’ uses. We started with a solution based on Mozilla Hubs (editor’s note: closed in May 2024), in order to create an autonomous instance with the possibility of adding specific functionalities dedicated to the cultural milieu. We have carried out projects and explorations with organizations, museums, artists and researchers, which has enabled us to identify use cases,” explains Satellite project manager Gwendal Creurer. Today, the metaverse boasts just over 800 users. This figure is hardly comparable to those of Big Tech, but it does remind us that these new tools are part of a long R&D process. In France, the Cultural and Creative Industries research program (PEPR-ICCARE), steered by the CNRS and structured into seven research programs (including COMET on virtual environments), will no doubt have the opportunity to support the emergence of European and/or open-source solutions.
An eminently political subject
Finally, as in other sectors, the adoption of European solutions could be encouraged by indirect mechanisms, notably through eco-conditionality criteria and more assertive requirements on the part of public and private financiers. This principle already applies in many fields: in fashion, for example, opting for more virtuous alternatives often implies local production. But to encourage such a transition in the digital sector, we need to rethink the approach right from the design stage of business tools and strategies. “Most entrepreneurs perceive regulation as a hindrance to business, whereas it could be a lever to steer innovation towards more sustainable and ethical models”, stresses Amaury La Burthe.
While the emancipation of XR professionals from Big Tech will only be possible at the price of a complete paradigm shift, a far-reaching European digital policy, with real ethical rules, could act as a spark for this systemic transformation. But only if this dependence is truly seen as problematic.
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