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GBNext Hollywood 3.0 panel: XR creators say participatory, shared worlds are the next entertainment frontier

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GBNext Hollywood 3.0 panel: XR creators say participatory, shared worlds are the next entertainment frontier

At GamesBeat Next 2026 in San Francisco, a panel of immersive-media creators discussed how spatial computing could turn places like Hollywood into worlds people can enter, not just watch. Moderator Shawn Barrett of TCL Chinese Theatres framed the session around Hollywood 3.0 and the “Hollyverse,” a planned interactive platform tied to the physical location.

Barrett said about 350 million people have visited Hollywood in the past 20 years, compared with 4 billion gamers worldwide. LED panels will move along Hollywood Boulevard starting December 15 so visitors can interact with games. “We think that there’s going to be tourism gaming that will explode,” he said.

Evo Heyning, who leads Reality Craft, said immersive media used to be locked inside apps and platforms. “With WebXR and now with the Immersive Web SDK, game developers can produce their own work straight to the web,” she said. “They can own the relationship with the audience, and they are not bound to a platform taking 30 or 50%.” Web games aren’t for everyone, Heyning added, “but for game developers who were looking for a way to get into this industry, it becomes a much more even playing field.”

Heyning is releasing games built from Gaussian splat scans of real places, plus the family-friendly titles Leader Legacy and Town Life. She shared that cross-play has been the hard part. “You can’t use your AI bots to do the testing,” she said. “You have to really do it with humans. You have to do it across lots of different devices.


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