By 2030, the immersive entertainment market is projected to reach $473.9 billion, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 23.5%. Virtual reality alone is forecast to generate $207 billion by the end of the decade.
The gaming industry has led this charge, normalizing the use of VR headsets and motion-tracking to create deeply interactive and captivating environments. Meanwhile, live event producers are layering augmented and mixed reality into performances to deliver data-driven visuals and real-time effects that heighten emotional impact. More and more media companies, ranging from music labels to theme parks, are exploring immersive and hybrid formats as a way to reimagine audience engagement.
Tech giants are also fueling this shift. Apple’s 2023 debut of the Vision Pro and Meta’s continued development of the Quest series underline a long-term strategic bet on XR as the next computing platform. The capital flows, the devices, and the content are aligned —immersive technology is no longer experimental. It’s commercial.
XR Investment in Arts and Culture
Although most XR investments have gone to gaming, entertainment, and training, the arts and culture sector is steadily gaining traction as well. Museums, galleries, and cultural platforms are adopting immersive technologies to expand access, deepen engagement, and reshape how audiences experience art. Whether for commercial gain, educational impact, or artistic experimentation, XR tools are increasingly viewed as essential components of the digital strategy across the art world. As these technologies mature, they bring both opportunities and demands, from storytelling innovation to data-driven infrastructure.
Reimagining Cultural Engagement: The Digital Transformation of Museums
Learn MoreThe Growing Investment Landscape
The rise in XR adoption across the arts and culture sector mirrors broader trends in entertainment. Significant technological improvements, including more affordable VR headsets, better spatial audio, and increasingly lifelike digital rendering, are reducing barriers to entry for institutions of all sizes. These advancements, combined with rising public interest in immersive art experiences, are driving sustained investment into both virtual and hybrid exhibition formats.
Between 2019 and 2024, the number of immersive art venues worldwide grew from just over 100 to more than 350. That includes purpose-built spaces designed to host XR-centric content, often supported by major investors and powered by technologies like high-resolution LED walls and projection mapping. What’s particularly noteworthy is the speed of the second wave of immersive institutions — many of them VR-first — which reached 50 venues globally in just over a year, far outpacing the five-year timeline it took the first generation of digital galleries to reach the same number.
This acceleration reflects both consumer appetite and improving hardware. VR technology has become more lightweight, portable, and visually compelling, prompting a shift from one-off XR installations to longer-term programming and capital investment.
Museums Commit to XR as a Core Strategy
Across the arts and culture sector, museums and public galleries are no longer treating XR as a novelty — it’s becoming a foundational part of how they engage visitors. Ambitious projects are emerging across continents, supported by a mix of public funding, academic partnerships, and commercial collaborations.
One of the most successful examples to date is Horizon of Khufu, a VR experience by Excurio that launched in 2022 and has since welcomed over 2 million visitors across 20 international venues. Similarly, XR projects from Barcelona-based Univrse have surpassed 2 million views as they tour cities across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
In the UK, long-running support for immersive content development has helped stimulate this momentum. Creative XR, a public programme launched in 2017, has funded over 60 prototypes and helped 12 projects receive full-scale production support, distributing more than £850,000 in funding across three cohorts.
A major leap forward came in 2023, when the University of Glasgow announced Museums in the Metaverse, a £5.6 million initiative to build a virtual museum platform where curators can design their own VR exhibitions. Visitors using headsets will be able to explore 3D-scanned artifacts and virtually access collections that rarely see the light of day. The goal is to surface 90% of museum holdings typically kept in storage and make them globally accessible.
Immersive Experiences Drive Engagement and New Revenue
One of the earliest commercial applications of AR in the art world came from Christie’s, which launched an app in 2018 that allowed collectors to visualize hanging artworks in their own space. Fast forward to 2025, and Christie’s has doubled down on immersive tools — collectors using Apple’s Vision Pro headset can inspect selected works in a fully virtual setting, available directly through the Christie’s mobile app.
Meanwhile, public institutions are using XR not just to enhance the visitor journey but to tell deeper, emotionally resonant stories. One powerful example is “Envisioning Our Planet’s Future”, a collaboration between the Natural History Museum and SAOLA, which uses Mixed Reality to place audiences inside a speculative future ecosystem grounded in scientific research. Using animated 3D specimens based on real physical collections, visitors explore eight narrative-driven environments focused on species, habitats, and climate risks. The result is an immersive storytelling experience that resonates particularly with younger audiences - the exhibit has already drawn over 325,000 visitors, with several reporting they were moved to tears by the content. Feedback from the project highlights the power of MR to transform passive viewing into interactive engagement. The emotional intensity, paired with scientific integrity and user agency, created an experience that was not only memorable but mission-aligned, raising awareness about environmental fragility in a format that appeals to digital-native audiences.
Another telling case comes from Norway: a volumetric VR replica of polar explorer Roald Amundsen’s house. Limited to just 3,000 in-person visitors annually due to conservation concerns, the digitized version has been explored by over 28,000 users, nearly 10 times more, through Steam, the gaming platform. Using high-resolution photogrammetry and layered sound design, the VR experience recreates every detail of the home, from piano notes to floorboard creaks. The team also integrated digitized objects from other collections and added rich storytelling elements, including voiceovers, archival clips, and text narratives. Plans are underway to expand the experience into classrooms using AR/VR, and even develop an AI-powered avatar of Amundsen for a future expansion.
Each of these projects demonstrates how immersive experiences crafted using XR technologies can extend reach, deepen engagement, and unlock new revenue streams, whether through virtual ticketing, educational licensing, or VR platform and mobile app sales. As the technology matures and audiences become more comfortable with immersive media, these examples are proving that investment in XR isn’t just speculative, it’s strategic.
Final Thoughts
Extended reality is no longer an experimental add-on. It’s quickly becoming an essential part of how audiences interact with media, culture, and art. As XR continues to evolve, it opens new creative and commercial opportunities for organizations that are ready to adapt.
DataArt’s Media & Entertainment practice helps all kinds of art industry players embrace change and stay ahead of it. Our expertise in both art and XR technologies allows us to design and build bespoke art tech solutions from the ground up, deliver immersive AR/VR solutions that redefine user experiences, and help our clients to explore new opportunities for engagement and monetization. Explore how we can help here!
