Conference
Expanding Realities
Spatial Storytelling
ON SITE
Bertha-Benz-Saal
Thursday, May 07, 14:30
Ghosts of Performances Past: Five Years of A Christmas Carol VR
Video on demand
Live XR layers on many challenges inherent to broadcast, virtual production, animation, game development, and theatre, compounded with the additional challenges of wrestling with an untested emerging medium. How do you build production pipelines that support one-of-a-kind experiences without starting from scratch each time?
In this session, Alex Coulombe (Agile Lens) and Emmy-winning XR creator David Gochfeld trace the evolution of A Christmas Carol VR — an annual live XR production that, over five years, became a vital R&D sandbox for scalable spatial storytelling.
Following the project across five iterations, they share how tools, techniques, and production systems evolved in response to real constraints — from performance capture and live direction to audience experience and replay capabilities. They also examine how this process informed recent work developing tools with the Royal Shakespeare Company and how all these lessons are coalescing into their new spatial storytelling platform, Stage Presence.
This talk explores how repeated live production can drive new approaches to XR creation, combining theatre and stagecraft with real-time pipelines to create work that is responsive, repeatable, and artist-driven.
Alex Coulombe, Leader in XR / Spatial Computing | CEO, Agile Lens
Alex Coulombe is a leading figure in spatial storytelling and real-time immersive media.
An architect turned XR-chitect, Alex has spent more than fifteen years pioneering the use of virtual reality for performance, design, and narrative exploration. In 2013, while at Fisher Dachs Associates, he developed the first VR-based system for evaluating theatrical sightlines, laying the groundwork for a new era of previz and performance methodologies.
In 2016 he co-founded Agile Lens: Immersive Design, an award-winning XR studio in New York that creates cutting-edge experiences across architecture, theatre, and interactive media. Their work includes large-scale visualization for NEOM, Four Seasons, and David Geffen Hall, narrative XR projects such as The Orchard starring Mikhail Baryshnikov, Your Mind Girls, and the long-running A Christmas Carol VR, as well as a groundbreaking research collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company on mixed reality rehearsal workflows.
Alex is an Unreal Engine Authorized Instructor and longtime partner of Epic Games, where he has developed flagship real-time curriculums, taught hundreds of courses, and founded Manhattan’s first Unreal Engine Authorized Training Center. His talks, workshops, and research have been featured at SIGGRAPH, GDC, SXSW, AWE, IEEE GEM, TCG, RTC, SPAF, and Unreal Fest events worldwide.
He can be found on most platforms at @ibrews.
David Gochfeld, XR Creator, Director and Technical Producer for VR, AR and MR
David Gochfeld is an award-winning immersive media creator, a theatrical director and performer, and a researcher focusing on XR technologies for theatre and immersive storytelling. His pioneering work with live performance in virtual reality has appeared at festivals worldwide, including Tribeca, Raindance, SXSW and the Venice Biennale Cinema. Besides directing his own projects, he advises theatre companies in the US, UK and Europe on interactive and immersive technologies for theatrical productions. As a researcher, he was an XR Stories Research Fellow at the University of York, and the Performance Lab Fellow at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where he helped establish their new motion capture studio and led an R&D collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company. His research explores immersive dramaturgy, motion capture performance techniques, embodiment and interaction in virtual environments, and UX design of spatial computing tools for performing artists.