In April the Immersive Experience Network partnered with the World Experience Organisation (WXO) for London Experience Week. This was a gathering of the international experience industry over five days in the capital for talks, networking and sampling the best homegrown projects the sector has to offer.
It was the fourth annual gathering of the WXO, and the largest so far. From an event base at the Ministry of Sound, the event brought together senior leaders, creators and operators from more than 40 countries, largely representative of the 1250 global members of the WXO.
The week comprised three main strands: the World Experience Summit, the Experience Safari, and a programme of fringe events and activations including the Immersive Experience Network’s in-person huddle. There was also an awards ceremony to highlight the incredible work being done behind the scenes, and a closing party to let loose in the world-famous club.
In the six short years the WXO has existed, it has made a huge impact. International projects have been forged here, including the phenomenally successful Delhi-based Shiva Immersive which opened this year after first meeting Italian collaborators at WXO. Decision-makers in the creative, technical and business fields mix and mingle and learn from each other, and the projects being discussed are world-leading.
For the head of the WXO, James Wallman, this is exactly what he envisioned when he created the organisation in 2020: “Our mission is to connect people with the ideas and the other people who make experiences, across sectors, and across geographies” says James. The ultimate goal, he says, is to make better experiences that impact individuals while also being scalable and profitable “so they can have an impact on the individual and an impact on society.”
It was while working for the Department for International Trade that James first realised – through his research – the power and potential of the immersive experiences sector, and the support it needed. He suggested that the DiT create a global organisation for that purpose, but it wasn’t to be. James took it upon himself to create the WXO independently, and there has been no looking back.
The first few years were entirely online, he explains: “We’d do these zoom calls every week, which we call campfires, and they happen at a time they can work for people in Sydney and Shanghai, San Francisco, LA, etc”. But, in the experience sector in particular, people just love to get together in person, so the idea of an annual meet-up was born. The World Experience Summit has now taken place in London three times since the first event in 2023, broken by a single year at the House of Yes in Brooklyn, New York, in 2024.
James explains that the original plan was to move the summit across Europe, the US and Asia, but that London has a particular combination of elements that make it optimal for the gathering. While also waxing lyrical about other cities around the world (“LA has some amazing innovation, as does Las Vegas, some of the VR stuff coming out of France is obviously phenomenal, Montreal is really special too”) James kept coming back to the realisation that, for the experience sector, “London has really got a special thing going”.
“London has a density, and the startup scene and creative scene is really strong, there’s the number one Theatreland in the world. So London has this sort of magic that means that there’s lots of innovation that happens in experiences. There’s also money, so you’ve got the commercial side and the pretty wild creative side.”
As an attendee, hopping between the conference venue and the individual ‘experience safari’ locations felt manageable – even with the obstacle of a tube strike. The same probably couldn’t have been said of LA, for example, despite James’ enthusiasm for some of the work happening there.
Among the UK-based orgs and experiences attendees had in-person access to were Secret Cinema, Punchdrunk, Bridge Command, ABBA Voyage, Lightroom, Phantom Peak, Barbican, Wake the Tiger, V&A, Clockwork Dog/COGS, BFI, Elvis Evolution, Bompas & Parr, COLAB Theatre, Frameless, Immerse LDN, Lander 23, Moco Museum, NEON at Battersea Power Station, and The Traitors Live Experience – to name just a few.
James also recognises that the summit can support people in the sector who may not have a pass for the main event, but can still participate in things like the IEN’s Creator Huddle. “This is partly why we’re working with the Immersive Experience Network. If there’s a week when people come to London who work in this sector, it means that whether you come to the event that we run or not, there will be other people in town. That’s a really efficient way to talk to lots of different people from around the world who really care about experiences.”
This knowledge-sharing – regardless of whether it happens within the Summit or not – is something James recognises as vital to the elevation of experiences around the world, largely because the goal of financial sustainability is still in question. Likening it to the growth and stability of the cinema, James says: “One of our things is looking at whether we have a format now for sustainable location-based experiences. The models that work there might be borrowed into museums, and then they might be borrowed into fulldome experiences, etc, so it’s a big borrowing to create better experiences and a better experience economy.”
James’ track record for predicting and guiding these kinds of developments isn’t limited to founding the WXO. In 2013 he self-published his book Stuffocation, an early warning that experiences – rather than possessions – would be drivers of disposable income spending.
“I gave up my job to write this book. And a lot of very good friends of mine, and people, probably much more sensible, were like ‘don’t do this, it’s a lovely idea, but it’s just not true’.”
He didn’t just meet with pushback from people close to him, but also from publishers. “The book was rejected by 75 publishers in New York and London, because they said it was a lovely idea that people were moving away from material things and moving to experiences instead, but it wasn’t true.”
A successful book, a global organisation, and four annual summits later, James admits that “it’s taken years of plugging away” and that the result is “deeply satisfying”. It’s also clear, from the energy he put into this year’s summit, that he has even bigger ambitions for all of us.
