For its return to the Christmas season and as a flagship event at the end of the year, after two editions in the autumn, Stereopsia in Brussels innovated with the opening of a new market dedicated to all new forms of immersive creation – across all industries. The EMIC (European Market for Immersive Creativity) aims to build bridges between all the talents in the sector, on projects that may concern culture, heritage, industry, health, etc. We spoke to Pascal Diot, the French director of this new market, as well as the founder and manager of several global events for professionals in the audiovisual industries: the Venice Production Bridge, Tokyo Gap Financing Market or the European CoProduction Forum.
EMIC, a new multi-sector immersive market
Pascal Diot – EMIC is a Stereopsia project, initiated by Alexandra Gerard, which received funding from the European Union (Creative Europe Programme / Markets & Networking). That’s when I joined the project to coordinate the market. With EMIC, there’s a clear interest in going beyond traditional immersive content. There are bridges and synergies with the world of technology, the world of science and so on. While our first edition welcomed content producers, EMIC is intended to be broader than that. In 2024 I’ve brought along museums, cultural venues and local and regional authorities to put them in touch with the people who make the content.
And meetings are necessary. Immersive experiences are increasingly part of our daily lives. There’s added value in offering innovation with XR, it brings in an extra audience, extra tourism. In the medical field, in architecture, in training, and so on. Immersive creation touches every area of life. In my opinion, these are real opportunities. For the European institutions, this is one of the major directions to take in future funding programmes. With a multi-domain, multi-sector intention, of course. So we need to find new ways of presenting all this to the markets.

The aim of EMIC is to introduce immersive creation to players who are not used to exploring these new territories. So, as well as one-to-one meetings, there will be opportunities for exchanges, panels and presentations of larger projects for the second edition. We’re welcoming the Booster, Stereopsia’s emblematic programme of support for projects in development, to the Market to showcase the 11 projects that made it up in 2024. They were able to meet producers, sellers, financiers and others.
With television and broadcasters, apart from RTBF, it’s harder to get them interested. But the meetings at Stereopsia are encouraging them to take an interest in the XR cultural sector. We need to encourage new entrants, open up a somewhat closed ecosystem, while remaining B2B for the time being. Questions about the production and co-production of immersive works come up regularly. There are still a lot of mysteries about how these productions come into being, where they go and who collaborates on them. We need to encourage international relations and the development of intellectual property that will make the medium more dynamic.
The Venice Production Bridge, a growth market
At Venice, the Production Bridge inevitably accompanies the competition (Venice Immersive for the XR), with a strong focus on content. And the demand for panels and stands, particularly on the immersive island, is increasing from countries! They want to showcase their financing and their capacity to host productions. We have to be able to meet these demands, but it’s extremely reassuring – especially outside the countries that are already identified in the industry.
We also need to encourage porosity between industries, and not keep new writing away from the cinema. In Venice, for example, I’m inviting literary publishers to promote big-screen adaptation projects. And I’m building a bridge with immersive producers, of course, so that they can discover presentations (on the island) of interesting books for XR. Then, at the Venice Gap-Financing Market, feature films and XR experiences are on the same level. We’re trying to steer professionals towards both formats. Some are already producing both (Sacrebleu productions, GEDEON…). For those new to XR, it can be quite a surprise! Every year at the VPB, we have the idea of guest countries (1 European and 1 international) as one of our programming axes. We may increase the number of guest countries depending on the requests we receive. Countries with an immersive activity, of course, always with the idea of linking all the activities on site. And we’re also going to increase the market by an extra day, to give us more possibilities for the programme.
In this desire to bring the audiovisual industries closer together, I remain sceptical about the ambitions of related formats, such as immersive feature films. The long format in XR doesn’t work very well. There are some projects, often by filmmakers, but they haven’t yet found the right formula. And technical limitations remain an obstacle. We’re still waiting for the next devices, which will be easier to use.
The place of XR in Europe
Immersive, XR, is an important issue at European level. And increasing its presence in Brussels, with Stereopsia, also makes sense in terms of bringing together people interested in the fields concerned. Ireland and Portugal were already well represented as emerging countries at the 2024 event. Greece too. With recent ecosystems under construction, there are some exciting things happening around Europe – particularly in Morocco. However, we need to be aware that the potential today lies mainly on the industrial side, across all verticals, and not in culture or the audiovisual sector, which often remain the visible face of these hybrid and emerging creations.

EMIC comes at a time when immersive works are coming of age. But what’s missing is a structure. And the main problem remains that of exploitation and distribution. We need to work with creators to better understand how these (extraordinary!) experiences can be circulated, transported and dismantled… These constraints can help creation, not hinder it. The venues, which are already used to these logistical issues, are asking for it. You have to realise that internationally, in the United States and China in particular, XR exists mainly in shopping centres. The models are much more linked to pre-existing profitability models, which are not just cultural. The potential is definitely there.
We can see the difference between the maturity of European creation and the rest of the world. This is the key to the recent success of many productions. Obviously, some areas are lagging behind, particularly in Africa. And it’s EMIC’s role to examine this, to invite companies or countries outside Europe to join us. We want to initiate international collaborations based on the expertise of European talent.
We mustn’t fall into the problems we had with the film markets and others, with a proliferation of professional markets. There needs to be much more cooperation between events, so that we don’t have too many meetings in the annual schedule. We need to work on the specifics for those who want to get started, and have a common meeting point during the year. Stereopsia at the end of the year is also ideal.
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