A Report from the IMMERSIVE X Conference, Nov. 11th, 2025 (FIRST DRAFT, TO BE UPDATED)

Yesterday, November 11th, 2025, I had the opportunity to attend three sessions of the IMMERSIVE X conference, held on three different platforms:

• IMMERSIVE X 2025 Warm-Up: Curator’s Remarks (held in VRChat)
• Andy Fidel’s keynote, The State of the Metaverse in 2026 (held in ENGAGE)
• Julian Reyes’ presentation, Preserving the Legacy of Digital Culture: The Virtual Worlds Museum™ Living Archive (held in Spatial)

Warm-Up: Curator’s Remarks (Thomas Zorbach)

Set in a custom-built theatre surrounded by lush rainforest. Thomas Zorbach set the tone and agenda for the conference sessions to follow over the hree days of the conference. My friend Carlos Austin was the videographer for the event (as he no doubt will be for many of the conference sessions!), and he produced the following video of Thomas’ speech, which was posted to the IMMERSIVE X YouTube streams channel (I also took some photos using VRChat’s built-in camera, but I first have to figure out how to trasnfer them from VRChat to my blog!).

The State of the Metaverse in 2026 (Andy Fidel)

Andy’s keynote was prefaced by a half-hour red carpet awards session where various people were introduced and several awards were given out (I arrived late for this part, but here’s the 35-minute video from IMMERSIVE X’s YouTube channel). Here’s the blurb from the conference program:

What an entrance! Dress your avatar to impress and flash your most dazzling smile for the photo. Once again, the path to the Opening Keynote leads across the legendary red carpet of the Polys Theater, home of the annual Polys Awards. Thanks to Ben Erwin and his incredible Polys team, this festive event marks the official start of IMMERSIVE X 2025. Don’t miss this prestigious social event in the Metaverse — you might just be in for a surprise or two.

After the red carpet, we all moved over to the main stage where Andy Fidel, the founder and creative lead at Spatial Networks, shared her insights on where the metaverse stands today and where it might be heading. Because I attended the event in my Vive Pro 2 VR headset, I did not take written notes of her talk, but it was excellent! I am hoping that there will be a stream recording of her presentation.

I did also take some pictures while in ENGAGE, but as with VRChat, I need to figure out how to transfer those photos from ENGAGE to this blog! Also, because I did not take notes, I will have to let my thoughts percolate a bit before I add my impressions to this blog post!

I want to thank Thomas Zorbach for shoehorning me into this avatar-packed session, after I personally begged him to let me in, even though the event was fully booked and no longer accepting signups. I did not want to miss Andy’s speech, and I was not disappointed!

Preserving the Legacy of Digital Culture: The Virtual Worlds Museum™ Living Archive (Julian Reyes)

I was not sure if I was going to be able to attend this session (I was having all kinds of trouble getting Spatial to work for me, and I eventually threw my hands up, gave up on attending in virtual reality, and instead visited via my flatscreen monitor on my Windows home computer instead). However, I am so, so glad that I did! A video stream of the 45-minute presentation has alrady been posted to the IMMERSIVE X YouTube channel, but I will also add some of my own remarks (since I was on desktop, I took written notes).

This blogpost will be updated as I add pictures and more of my impressions, so check back later today for those updates! I enjoyed all three sessions, and I am very much looking forward to the sessions I will be attending today and tomorrow!

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