Alternate Realities is Sheffield DocFest’s immersive XR strand. In 2026 the programme is centered around the documentary and storytelling possibilities of gaming multi-worlds, which act as meeting spaces for many different communities.
In order to support early career, independent creatives or those with ideas in very early stages, the programme will host a three-day Storytelling in Gaming: Challenge Lab, in strategic partnership with Sheffield Hallam University and supported by the British Council. Five creative teams will develop prototypes for new work in a structured lab residency.
After a global public call out, we are delighted to announce the five selected teams who will take part. The five teams include international participants from Kenya and India, as well as from closer to home in Yorkshire. The projects they will work on explore wide ranging themes and narratives, taking in long-distance connections, local folklore, Indian cinema, gender identity and the ethical dilemmas of driving an ice cream van! The teams will use a variety of gaming platforms to explore innovative ways to involve the player in an interactive experience, driven by a narrative storyline.
Each team will develop a prototype within a structured, supportive setting over 11th and 12 June, before experiencing their work at Sheffield Hallam's 360° immersive suite (the Igloo). They will then present to an industry panel at the Alternate Realities Summit on Saturday 13 June for constructive feedback, and have the opportunity to network with attending professionals.
The teams are hosted in the brand new facilities of Sheffield Hallam's South Yorkshire Institute of Technology, located in its City Campus. This includes access to the technical expertise of researchers in games design, digital media production and new technologies, and the opportunity to visualise their prototypes within the Igloo 360° immersive environment.
Teams Information
WHAT WE CARRY
Team Members: Hantao Li, Seungju Lee, Juice Cui, Zhifei Liang
Project Description: Set within the confined interior of an ice cream van, the project explores mobility, labour, and informal exchange in 1970s–80s Glasgow. During a period of rapid urban expansion, many families moved to peripheral estates where everyday infrastructure was limited. In this gap, the ice cream van became a mobile shop, social space, and delivery network — later entangled with criminal pressure and illegal economies. The player occupies the role of a driver, serving ice cream while deciding what else the van should carry: groceries, favours, or unmarked packages. Through a short playable route, the game turns everyday labour into a narrative space of social pressure and moral choice.
Image Credit: Hantao Li - 'What We Carry' WIP
TukiwaiT (As We Wait)
Team Members: Nzolo Muthama, Thomas Buckley, Joe Harrington, Phoebe Hyder
Project Description: TukiwaiT is a new international creative technology project exploring long-distance friendship, digital intimacy and the strange ways people stay connected across borders. Developed between the UK and Kenya, the project builds on the real creative friendship between Joe and Lexas, using performance, storytelling, sound, 3D scanning and interactive digital tools to ask how technology can hold care, memory and presence.
The team formed through a British Council CTC scoping grant between National Youth Theatre and Youth Theatre Kenya, where Thomas Buckley and Phoebe Hyder travelled to Kenya to work with Joe, Lexas and local collaborators. The team brings together theatre making, poetry, youth facilitation, puppetry, XR, sound design and digital art, creating a strong mix of lived experience and international collaboration.
Image Credit: Nzolo Muthama and Joe Harrington
The Boggarts of The Spooklights
Team Members: Nikki Stearman, Mark Lindsey, Hoi Man Yuen, Paul Gush
Project Description: Boggarts live in the Peak district. According to folklore, these mischievous creatures lure travellers from their chosen path in the strange twilight hours with their spooklights of blue. Boggarts of the Spooklights brings folklore playfully to life using whispering sounds, playful storytelling and light paths to shape the audience’s experience and take them on a sensory journey.
RAYSCAPES: Follow the Sound, Not the Spectacle
Team Members: Mayank Dutt Kaushik, Seerat Kaur, Chaitanya Sachdeva, Dr. Kaushik Bhaumik
Project Description: RAYSCAPES: Follow the Sound, Not the Spectacle is an expanded cinema environment built in Unreal Engine that transforms Satyajit Ray's cinematic universe into a navigable computational landscape. Part playable memory-space, part immersive installation, and part cinematic arcade, the project invites audiences not merely to observe Apu's world, but to move through and inhabit it.
Light filtering through bamboo corridors, drifting crows, dust-filled pathways, fragmented domestic objects, reactive soundscapes, and spatialised Jatra voices respond dynamically to movement and proximity, producing a living audiovisual field continuously reshaped by participant presence.
Drawing from cinema studies, ludology, performance traditions, and expanded cinema practices, the work approaches computational media cultures as both methodology and embodied experience, returning to cinema through the body rather than solely through the eye. RAYSCAPES reimagines South Asian cinematic memory through immersive combinatorial systems and non-sequitur forms of storytelling, transforming Ray's humanist sensory worlds into explorable terrains of play, atmosphere, and collective spectatorship.
Persona - Becoming Me
Team Members: Felicity Chen (Director, Producer), Lynn Song (Producer)
Project Description:
Persona is a 25-minute VR+MR journey following marginalized individuals finding freedom, identity, and connection in virtual worlds.
Based on lived experiences, we dive into the world of three individuals whose gender identity or neurodiversity has been framed as abnormal or sinful, yet who, within the freedom of VR social worlds, rebuild new forms of identity, safety, and belonging. Blending virtual embodiment with real-world testimony, Persona amplifies silenced voices while asking urgent questions about inclusion in emerging technologies, art forms, and social futures.
Persona VR is supported by Venice Biennale College Immersive and BFI DocSociety, presented internationally at CPHDOX, NewImages and Sheffield DocFest.
Main team:
Director, Producer, Writer: Felicity Chen
Producer: Lynn Song
Developer: Hankun Yu
Technical Artist: Zihan Chen
Persona Main Image by Felicity Chen
Indivisible: the 360 Igloo as prism/portal/potential
To complement the Challenge Lab and AR showcase there will be a free, one-day curated programme of Hallam artist-researchers showing video installations in the Sheffield Hallam University Igloo 360 immersive space. Each piece explores the potential for immersive place-inspired storytelling: centring research, innovation, and knowledge exchange to tell stories about climate, nature, resilience, and to document hidden histories of the city.
