The Venue Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Last week I wrote about the audience that doesn't exist. The idealized visitor that every immersive experience is designed for but who represents maybe 10% of the people who actually walk through the door. The response was fantastic, and the conversations that followed were even better.

But one thread kept surfacing. Not about visitors, not about content, not about technology. About the spaces themselves.

Where do you actually put this stuff?

A Problem That Keeps Showing Up

I keep having the same conversation. A creator with a strong concept, solid funding, technology that actually works, and an audience that wants what they're building. And then the same wall.

They can't find a space that can support the work.

Not because there aren't spaces available. There are plenty of empty warehouses, event halls, and cultural centers looking for tenants. The problem is that none of them are ready. Not even close.

The work needs reliable high-speed networking across the entire space. Controllable lighting zones that can shift on cue. Spatial audio that doesn't bleed between scenes. Power infrastructure that can handle 40 devices running simultaneously without tripping a breaker. Climate control that works when you put 200 bodies in a dark room full of heat-generating equipment.

The venue has four power outlets and a WiFi router from 2019.

That gap is where immersive experiences go to die. Not in the concept phase. Not in production. In the last mile, when a fully realized piece meets a space that was never built to support it. And it happens constantly, not as an exception but as the norm.

Ask yourself: how many experiences have you visited that felt like they were fighting the room? That's not a content problem. That's an infrastructure problem.

Good creators find ways to hide it. But every workaround is energy that should have gone into making the experience better, not making the building cooperate. And some experiences never get made at all, not because the idea wasn't good enough, but because there was nowhere to put them.

We've Seen This Before

Here's the thing. We forget that venues weren't always what they are now. There was a time, not that long ago, when booking a venue for a corporate event meant you got the room. Four walls and a ceiling. You want audio? Bring your own. Lighting? That's on you. WiFi? What's WiFi?

Then something shifted. Venues started investing. First it was basic PA systems. Then lighting rigs. Then reliable internet. Then AV packages with projectors and screens. Then tech riders became standard. Then venues started competing on infrastructure because clients expected it.

Today, nobody would book an event space that doesn't have WiFi, a house sound system, and configurable lighting. It's baseline. The absolute minimum.

Immersive is sitting right where live events sat 20 years ago. The demand is there. The creators are there. The audiences are there, and as I wrote last week, they're showing up in larger numbers and with more variety than the industry gives them credit for. But the physical infrastructure hasn't caught up.

More Than Projection Mapping

When people hear "immersive venue," they tend to think projection mapping. Big room, white walls, a few projectors. That's a start, but it's not what I'm talking about.

A venue that truly supports immersive work is something fundamentally different. It's a space where the architecture itself becomes part of the creative toolkit. Where creators can think in terms of zones, layers, transitions, and responsive environments rather than figuring out where to hide the cable runs.

But the hardware is only half the story. Maybe less than half.

A venue that works for immersive needs people who understand what immersive creators actually need. A technical team that speaks the language. Production support that knows the difference between a projection surface and a tracking zone. Someone who understands that when a creator says "I need the room to go completely dark," they mean completely, not "the emergency exit signs are still on and there's light leaking from the lobby."

It's an operational mindset, not just an equipment list.

The best music venues in the world aren't great because of their PA systems alone. They're great because the staff understands performers, the acoustics were designed with intention, and the whole operation is built around making the work land. The sound engineer matters as much as the speakers.

Immersive needs the same thing. Venues that don't just rent square meters but actively support what happens inside them.

And right now, most venue conversations start and end with the floor plan. Someone walks you through the space, tells you the square meters, points at the ceiling height, and assumes that covers it. But the moment you go immersive, the questions change completely. What's the power distribution per zone? What's the network topology? Can we control the HVAC independently in each room? What's the ambient noise floor? I've been through this enough times to know that most venue teams don't have answers to these questions until you're already on site, cables in hand, discovering the problems together. By then, you've burned half your setup time troubleshooting a building instead of tuning the experience.

The Chicken and the Egg

Here's where it gets circular. Venues won't invest in immersive infrastructure without proven demand. Creators can't prove demand without venues that let their work exist at its best. Audiences can't fall in love with experiences they never get to see because the spaces don't exist to show them properly.

Everyone is waiting for someone else to go first.

Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what happened with live music. With theater. With cinema. Every performance medium went through a phase where the art was ahead of the architecture. Where creators were retrofitting spaces that were never designed for what they were trying to do. Where audiences were having compromised experiences and nobody could figure out why the format wasn't scaling.

Then someone built the first proper venue. And everything changed.

So who goes first this time?

The B2B World Won't Wait

My bet is on corporate and B2B.

While the entertainment and cultural sectors debate whether the audience is big enough to justify the investment, the corporate world is already bumping into this ceiling every day. Think about what's happening at trade shows, product launches, dealer events, and experience centers. Companies with complex products and long sales cycles are increasingly turning to interactive experiences to explain what they sell, train their networks, and close deals faster. They've moved past the "is immersive worth it?" conversation. They're in the "where do we put this?" conversation.

And they're running into the exact same wall.

A manufacturing company wants to build a permanent interactive showroom where dealers can configure and explore products in real time. The technology exists. The business case is clear. But try finding a venue or event space that can support spatial computing, real-time 3D rendering, and multi-user interaction without the company having to build the infrastructure from scratch every single time.

That's the part that kills scalability. Every new location means re-engineering the basics. Every trade show means bringing your own everything because the convention center offers you power, WiFi, and a pipe-and-drape booth. Every experience center project starts with months of space preparation before the actual experience design even begins.

B2B has the budgets, the recurring need, and the commercial urgency to justify venues that come pre-built for this work. When a company is spending six figures on a single trade show activation, and half of that budget goes to infrastructure that gets torn down three days later, the math for a purpose-built immersive venue starts looking very attractive.

Entertainment will follow. But corporate will prove the model first, because for them, this isn't about art or culture. It's about revenue. And revenue has a way of making infrastructure happen faster than anything else.

What a Purpose-Built Immersive Venue Looks Like

I'm not talking about a tech-filled black box. I'm talking about a space designed with the same intentionality that a recording studio or a theater brings to its craft.

Think about what makes a great recording studio great. It's not the mixing desk. It's the fact that every surface, every cable route, every acoustic panel, and every person in the room exists to serve the work. The building disappears so the music can show up.

Now imagine that for immersive. A space where infrastructure flexes between productions. Where power, data, and rigging aren't crammed along the walls but distributed throughout. Where acoustic treatment lets sound designers sculpt what the audience hears. Where climate systems account for the reality of 200 bodies, machines, and darkness sharing the same air. Where front-of-house operations understand that experiential ticketing, variable capacity, and accessibility in non-standard environments are all part of the job.

And crucially, a team that bridges the gap between the building and the creator. Not a venue that hands over the keys and says good luck. A venue that actively participates in making the work better. That understands the creative intent well enough to anticipate problems before load-in day.

But even the best in-house team can't cover everything. Immersive work throws creative and technical challenges that no single organization has all the answers to. What you really need around a venue like this is a fabric of partner organizations, specialists who are eager to solve the kinds of problems that don't have a playbook yet. Spatial audio engineers. Real-time rendering experts. Interaction designers who've worked at scale. People who get excited when a creator walks in with something nobody's tried before, not people who reach for the standard package. A venue becomes a platform when it builds that community around itself. When it can say to a creator: we don't just have the space and the infrastructure, we have the people who can help you figure out the parts you haven't solved yet.

Someone Is Actually Building This

I wrote earlier that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. Turns out, not everyone is waiting.

Corda Arena in Belgium is set to open later this year. It's a purpose-built 10,000 m² space designed from the ground up for the kind of work I've been describing, dynamic LED screens, spatial audio, holographic projection, AR and VR integration, hybrid event infrastructure connecting a physical audience of 3,000+ with millions more online.

It's a data point, not a solution. One venue in Belgium doesn't close a global infrastructure gap. But it matters because it proves the model. It proves that someone looked at the gap between what creators need and what venues offer and decided to close it. When one venue demonstrates that this approach works, others will follow. That's how every infrastructure shift in every medium has started.

The direction is set. The question is how long the rest of the industry waits before it catches up.

The Opportunity Nobody Else Is Taking

The immersive market isn't struggling because audiences don't care. Last week's article made that clear. People are showing up in bigger numbers and with more variety than anyone expected.

And it isn't struggling because creators lack vision. The ideas are extraordinary. The talent pool is deeper than it's ever been.

The bottleneck is the space between the two. Literally. The physical, operational, institutional gap where brilliant concepts meet buildings that can't support them.

Corda is a start. But one venue in Belgium doesn't solve a global infrastructure gap. The question is who follows.

Whoever figures it out at scale is going to change the economics of the entire industry. Not by building one flagship venue but by proving the model. By showing that a space designed for immersive work attracts better creators, delivers better experiences, builds more loyal audiences, and generates more revenue per square meter than a multipurpose hall ever could.

Every medium gets the venues it deserves, eventually. Film got cinemas. Music got concert halls. Theater got purpose-built stages with fly systems and wing spaces. Each time, the early infrastructure was improvised. Each time, someone eventually said: this art form deserves a space that was built for it.

We're at that moment. The question isn't whether immersive venues will exist. It's who builds them first, and whether the rest of the industry is paying attention when they do.

We don't need more empty rooms with a projector bolted to the ceiling. We need spaces that are as ambitious as the work they host.