Built from the inside out

Every part of the Immersive industry has tried to solve its own piece of the problem. Funders have pushed for works that travel more easily. Venues have asked for content that fits their existing operational models. Festivals have optimised for cost and throughput. Archives have sought formats they can hold. Each approach is logical from within its own context. And yet the medium remains fragile, the ecosystem remains unsustainable, and the works keep disappearing.

In every case, the people in the room were serious, well-intentioned, and looking at a real problem. And in every case, they were looking at it through the lens of their own vertical. Which meant they were seeing one part of something that only makes sense when you see the whole. The Immersive medium is evolving faster than established conventions can account for. While the the conventions of film, broadcasting, and museum practice are well-tested in their original context, they do not map cleanly onto what Immersive is and how it works. A demand that works be made in multiple versions to accommodate different venues is reasonable from a funder's desk. It is unworkable from a maker's studio with a fixed budget. A requirement that content run on standalone hardware is understandable from a museum's operations team. At the same time it limits curators to linear, passive forms, and excludes inovative, interactive, experimental works.

Seeing this clearly required a vantage point that most people in the field never had access to. Avinash Changa spent fifteen years accumulating it.

Since founding WeMakeVR in Amsterdam in 2013, he has worked across almost every position the Immersive ecosystem contains: as a maker whose productions showed at Venice, SXSW, and IDFA; as a technologist building the infrastructure the medium was missing; as a jury member at IDFA DocLab; as a mentor at the Venice Biennale College program and IFFR; as a speaker at MIT, Cannes, and Venice. He has been in the rooms where funders set their criteria, in the venues where operational reality conflicts with curatorial ambition, and in the studios where the consequences of both arrive as constraints on the work. The BBC, Forbes, and The New York Times covered his work. His co-production Angels of Amsterdam became the first Dutch VR work ever selected for the Venice Biennale competition.

What that breadth gave him was not just experience. It was a systems-level view of how the different parts of the ecosystem interact. And an understanding of why the solutions each part was generating, however well-intentioned, were not adding up to a sustainable whole.

Three years ago, he focused that view on the most fundamental problem remaining: the technical fragility that meant every Immersive work was living on borrowed time from the moment it premiered. The dependency on specific hardware and software wasn't just a preservation problem. It was the root cause of the ecosystem's inability to sustain itself; the reason works couldn't be collected, re-presented, licensed, or funded with confidence. Everything else followed from it.

In early 2025, a technical breakthrough made it possible to break that dependency. Immersive works could now be preserved and re-presented independently of the platforms they were built on. Ahorse!, a WeMakeVR co-production that showed at SXSW in 2019, was restored to full functionality as the first proof of concept. Under the name Ahorse! Restored, it was presented to curators for The Eye Filmmuseum and the EYE film archive.

Next, Solipmission, a project which premiered in 2017, was restored. This project, and the underlying Preservation and Presentation-technology, was presented at IDFA DocLab in November 2025.

That presentation became the launch of IMPRES: infrastructure designed not to solve one vertical's problem, but to give the whole ecosystem what it has always needed and never had.

The Pilot Program is now running across Europe, with partners including IDFA, Venice Immersive, New Images, Institute for Sound & Vision, and the EYE Film Archive. Infrastructure shifts never look glamorous. But when they arrive, they redefine what is possible.