Over 165 entries. 26 finalists, whittled down by an expert panel of 13 judges. And just 5 winners, voted for by our WXO Members…
The first WXO Experience Awards were held Wednesday 12 June as part of the World Experience Summit at the House of Yes, New York City.
Around 300 experience innovators gathered to celebrate their chosen pioneers in the Art, Science, Business, Tech & Impact of Experience. We believe that the WXO Experience Awards have the potential to help solidify the importance of the experience industry and raise the profile of its foremost thinkers and creators. And this is just the beginning…
The full shortlist can be found here. And with no further ado, here are your 2024 winners:
Art
Experiences that are immersive, innovative, engage the senses, and make people feel something through outstanding design and/or operations.
WINNER: Rumble In The Jungle Rematch
Rumble in the Jungle Rematch is a live immersive event like no other. Reimagining the epic fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman that took place in Kinshasa, Zaire in 1974. Rematch takes a sporting story at its heart and creates an enlightening, passionate, emotional, engaging and totally unique experience, allowing fans to reexperience this incredible story first-hand. The fight is surrounded by a groundbreaking music festival – Zaire 74, brought to life through a 7 piece live band – The Zaire 74 All-Stars.
The event took 22,000 fans over 78 performances. A 30,000 sq ft warehouse in London was transformed, split into multiple areas allowing audiences to explore everything Kinshasa had to offer, taking in the music, the food, the fashion and all of the circus and hype surrounding the build-up to the fight. The production took a conscious decision to tell the story from the Congolese perspective. This gave the show a fresh, inclusive and intimate tone, and allowed it to integrate a more balanced and diverse set of characters to the dramatise the experience, whilst offering a new perspective on the historical events.
SCIENCE
Experiences that apply learnings from science in an engaging, novel or compelling way.
WINNER: Utopian Garden
Designed by flora&faunavisions, Utopian Garden is a 45-minute story-based fully-immersive interactive experience driven by co-creation. Visitors actively build their journey, interacting with dynamic projections in beautiful visual scenes focused on three chapters. A fully original, dynamic sound design paired with breathtaking digital art ensures that visitors are fully immersed.
Told over three gamified chapters, Utopian Garden explores how SCIENCE, NATURE, and ART can come together to create an exquisitely imagined digital paradise. The SCIENCE chapter emphasizes curiosity and exploration and highlights how examining repeating patterns in nature can lead to new discoveries. Visitors can create and play with gameified ‘supershape’ elements based on mathematical and scientific formula.
BUSINESS
Experiences that are profitable, repeatable, scalable, or achieved great things with a small budget.
Meow Wolf
If we asked you to name the biggest immersive success story of the 2020s, we’re pretty sure that Meow Wolf would be one of the first – if not THE first – names on your lips. The collective has launched exhibits in Las Vegas, Denver and beyond, and is soon to hit five. Sold over 300,000 presale tickets for Convergence Station. Been talked about everywhere from The New York Times to The Economist to Forbes. They’re making money, raising funds, and providing work to hundreds of artists, producers and creatives. Oh, and redefining what immersive art means along the way, bringing interactive and psychedelic experiences to the masses.
TECH
Experiences that use new or emerging technology, or apply any technology in a way that really elevates the experience.
The Ring Cycle
A pioneering fusion of classical opera and cutting-edge technology, flora&faunavisions “The Ring Cycle” is a revolutionary production of Richard Wagner’s epic “Ring des Nibelungen” featuring the groundbreaking digital set design This reinterpretation breathes new life into “The Ring Cycle”, transforming it into a contemporary fantasy land and establishing the world’s first fully digital realization of Wagner’s epic. Spanning a total runtime of 15 hours, the production involves 83 musicians and 102 voices, with flora&faunavisions’ digital design setting new standards through the application of the latest technologies in stage design and lighting.
The digital set features giant LED screens choreographed to move seamlessly across the stage. Fifteen rear-edge panels and eight additional side panels, capable of spatial movement, enhance the immersive experience. In “Die Walküre,” a central seven-meter-high white tree—a 3D-scanned bonsai tree scaled up—takes the spotlight. This immersive, kinetic, and interactive stage design seamlessly blends real opera singers with LED screens, creating awe-inspiring visual effects. flora&faunavisions invested years developing the kinetic digital set, integrating motion tracking for actor interaction with synchronized animations. Costumes incorporate signaling devices, and motion sensors record actors’ movements.
IMPACT
Experiences that have a positive impact on people, society, community or planet, whether through enhancing wellbeing, bringing people together, or being truly sustainable.
Dreamachine
Dreamachine is a “one-of-a-kind immersive experience” that takes audiences on a magical journey into their own minds. Unlike many immersive works of scale or spectacle, the kaleidoscopic world created by the Dreamachine comes from within. Designed by Turner-prize winning artists Assemble, with a score composed in spatial sound by Jon Hopkins, the experience generates a luminous world of colours, patterns and psychedelic imagery behind your closed eyes, created by the power of your own brain and completely unique to you.
A sell out success across the UK, Dreamachine reached over a million people across the in 2022, attracting over 500 press features and 5* reviews. But it was so much more than a media hit. Like a secular temple, the experience provided a rare space for shared reflection, and many visitors described profound and transformative emotional responses. Over 20,000 people created illustrations of their experience, producing one of the largest collections of publicly generated artworks in the world. Tens of thousands of colours were reported, with many witnessing colours they have never seen before. Many blind and partially-sighted people even described seeing colour for the first time.
