On Dec. 21, 2025, Ebenezer Scrooge will be haunted for the last time by disembodied spirits wearing Quest 2 or newer headsets.
Thereafter, the first fully embodied telling of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in consumer VR will play on loop around the holiday each year, replaying the spatially captured performance by Agile Lens.
“One of our white whales we finally achieved this holiday was a method for perfectly recording EVERYTHING that happens during a live show,” wrote architect and producer Alex Coulombe over direct message. “Mocap, show cues, audio, even everything the audience does. And we can play it back completely on demand.”
Since 2021, Agile Lens has put together the experimental VR telling of A Christmas Carol using the latest cutting edge capture and streaming technologies, including Unreal’s MetaHuman avatars. The production, along with other Agile Lens projects like a gigantic holodeck selling real estate in Texas, led the group to develop a tool called “Stage Presence” for the creation of future theatre-based productions in VR.
“We have no plans to shut down the app at this time— after the all-day VR replays on Christmas Eve, likely we’ll leave it as a bit of a museum where you can visit Charles Dickens’s study and see our old “Next Show in…” counter,” Coulombe wrote. “Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll find a good reason to bring it out of retirement.”
Tickets are free in Quest 2 or newer VR headsets to the final live showings held from Friday to Sunday. The performance stars Ari Tarr as Dickens and Scrooge with Debbie Deer as the ghosts, both of them wearing Quest Pro headsets for face and body capture. You’ll become a ghost yourself during the tellings this weekend, and visible to Scrooge as a disembodied spirit helping him come to terms with his behavior.
“I’m really proud of it. I’m going to miss it a lot. It’s been such a joy and such a useful resource to come back to,” said Kevin Laibson, who worked as a producer on the production. “You really can’t mess up a Christmas Carol – everyone knows it and loves it.”
“Likely next year we’ll pick a few dates to trigger some shared VR replays,” Coulombe wrote. “The ‘live’ audience will be there as ghosts of the “present” right alongside the audience ghosts of the “past”— it will all get very meta.”
We’re extremely curious to see what Agile Lens and their creators do next with theatre in VR and with their Stage Presence tool. There have been some impressive theatrical experiences like The Under Presents and The Tempest and much more made in VR by others, but nothing that’s been able to keep a troupe of actors employed continuously.
“VR live theatre is wonderful in terms of accessibility, but it’s still far from the ideal of actual breathing people in the same venue gasping and laughing together,” Coulombe wrote. “And so we’d love the chance to combine our mixed reality theatre toolset with our virtual reality theatre toolset for a production that caters to an on-site audience while also inviting participants from around the world to join in. That’s the goal of Stage Presence— a modular toolkit to service a wide range of live XR productions.”
