Immersion VR: launch of an educational project, between collective creation and virtual reality

On October 15, 2025, at the Canopé workshop in Lyon: the start of a unique creative adventure, having three middle school classes create a virtual reality film over the year, by first exploring what immersion truly means. First half-day of preparation with teachers, in collaboration with Festivals Connexion VR.

The “Digital Cultural Classes” (CCN) project of the Lyon Metropolis, designed by the public innovation laboratory Erasme, which has existed since 2002, is an educational and artistic program intended for middle schools, elementary schools and special education institutes in the territory, aimed at developing students’ digital culture and skills through collaborative projects. Entirely funded by the Metropolis, the CCNs bring together artists, scientists and teachers in a transdisciplinary dynamic combining online work on the laclasse.com platform and on-site meetings. Each participating class explores a theme — from virtual reality to sustainable cities, including coded music or data — to stimulate students’ creativity, cooperation and critical thinking while promoting digital inclusion. In 2024-2025, nine projects mobilized nearly 1,700 students and sixty classes, illustrating Greater Lyon’s commitment to combining educational innovation, cultural openness and territorial equity, particularly for schools in priority education networks.

An Introduction Through Sensory Experience

I chose to begin this session with a surprising setup. Before letting the teachers enter the dark room, I ask them to close their eyes and guide them by hand. “Immersion is first about sound,” I explained to them, “because we are always immersed in sound.” This approach echoes Michel Chion’s work on “audio-vision,” where sound is not merely an accompaniment to image but fully participates in constructing filmic space.

In the darkness I prepared, luminous words float on the walls, “Immersion,” “Reality,” “Virtual,” projected by an artisanal video mapping device I installed before their arrival. A simple camera films cut-out papers placed on a light table, with the video signal directly sent to the video projector. “It’s a short-throw video projector,” I specified to the participants, wanting to demonstrate that with limited technical means, one can create immersive spaces. I observe with satisfaction as teachers discover they can manipulate these visual elements in real time, one of them placing a luminous question mark on a colleague’s head.

This introduction establishes a fundamental principle of my pedagogical approach: before manipulating complex technologies, it’s about understanding the mechanisms of immersion. As Antonin Artaud already emphasized in “The Theatre and Its Double,” theatrical immersion, and by extension cinematic immersion, involves engaging all the senses, breaking with the traditional frontality of performance.

The Dialogue Between Digital Technologies and Artisanal Practices

The workshop reveals a productive tension that I deliberately cultivate between high technology and creative tinkering. On one side, Gala Frecon and Isabelle Bernoux from Festivals Connexion VR brought their latest generation Meta Quest 3 headsets to introduce teachers to virtual reality films with hand tracking and mixed reality. On the other, I’ve arranged acoustic musical instruments on a table — kalimba, triangle, guiro frog — alongside a Korg Kaossilator synthesizer, to create sound atmospheres.

This hybrid approach is not insignificant in my practice. It’s part of a broader reflection on young people’s appropriation of digital tools, becoming creators. Christophe Monnet, the project coordinator for Erasme, articulates the challenge well: “It’s a bit like if the Lumière Brothers invented the camera and we put it in students’ hands to make cinema.” I like this historical comparison because it reminds us that each new medium goes through an experimentation phase where creative uses exceed initial industrial intentions.

I proposed a collective musical improvisation to the participants, each gradually entering the sound loop with their instrument. Recording this sequence reveals an aspect I’ve often observed: “In the moment, we’re not necessarily musicians, we feel like it’s a bit rubbish,” I told them, “but when we listen back, it still makes us experience emotions beyond our own personal engagement issues.” This observation aligns with Christopher Small’s theories on “musicking,” the idea that collective musical practice creates meaning independently of technical virtuosity.

Defining a Meaningful Theme: Portraits of Forgotten Women in History

The discussion about the narrative content of the future film gradually brought out a theme close to my heart. Sylvain, a special education teacher, expressed his interest: “We’re in ninth grade, we’re addressing videos about otherness. It could echo that, making invisible women visible.” I seized this opportunity to share my passion for these equality issues: “I’m very committed to feminist issues. For a very long time, I’ve been working with the Women’s Film Festival in Créteil.”

I mentioned Ada Lovelace’s example to crystallize the stakes. “The inventor of computing in 1840. Her contribution is in the translator’s notes of a technical text. But these notes are three times longer than the text itself.” This anecdote perfectly illustrates the mechanisms of making women’s contributions invisible in the history of science, a subject extensively documented by historians like Margaret W. Rossiter and her concept of the “Matilda effect.”

Isabelle Bernoux enriched our discussion by mentioning Alicia Boole, “the first to successfully model fourth-dimensional geometric objects.” These references will allow us to cross disciplines — mathematics, computer science, visual arts — while questioning traditional representations of knowledge and innovation.

The Articulation Between Individual Vision and Collective Creation

The pedagogical framework I designed is structured around several temporalities and working methods. First, students will discover VR films carefully selected by Gala Frecon and Isabelle Bernoux. Gala presented us notably with “Draw for Change,” a documentary mixing real footage and animation about a Mexican activist using street art to reclaim public space.

“We have 70 films in our catalog,” Gala specified. “The idea is that we’ll not only favor fairly short films, between 10 and 20 minutes, so we can show several.” Festivals Connexion’s expertise will be invaluable: as Isabelle Bernoux emphasized, their five years of experience in schools allows them to finely adapt content to audiences. “We have documentaries, films dealing with geopolitics, a film about Iranian migration... We can really tailor things.”

My creative process will alternate between individual work (research on historical figures), creation in small groups (preparing portraits, then all elements necessary for making the film, throughout the year) and finally collective production in my presence (filming). “Each student needs to have a distinct mission,” I insisted. “Some are actors, some handle lighting, some make props.” This organization recalls the functioning of a professional film set, where role specialization paradoxically allows the emergence of a collective work.

Technical and Aesthetic Challenges of 360-Degree Cinema

I explained to the teachers the technical specificity of our approach: “We’ll make a flat film, except it will be around us,” thus distinguishing 360° capture from 3D modeling. This technical constraint becomes a creative opportunity for me: how to tell a story when the viewer can look in all directions?

Gala showed us “Gloomy Eyes,” a reference production with Tim Burton as artistic consultant, which reveals a different approach with “six degrees of freedom.” “The film builds around the viewer,” she explained to us. This variety of approaches shows that the VR medium is not monolithic but offers a spectrum of narrative possibilities that I’m eager to explore with the students.

My idea of creating “a gallery of portraits” where “each class creates portraits of three characters” elegantly circumvents the challenges of 360° narration. I already imagine viewers “entering a first portrait, then moving, it’s behind, and it’s a second portrait.” This modular structure will also facilitate collaboration between the three classes.

A Pedagogy of Experimentation and Subversion

Beyond the final production, this project reveals my pedagogical philosophy. “I believe that where we place education, creation, we shouldn’t be subject to the dictates of industrialists,” I stated. This position echoes Seymour Papert’s reflections on constructionism, where learning happens through building meaningful artifacts rather than passive assimilation of content.

I insisted on the importance of documenting the process: “There will have been many creative stages and telling everything that happened. The film is one part. It’s a result. And in reality, it’s a process.” Each stage will produce traces, attempts, discoveries that have as much value as the final film. This processual approach aligns with my artistic practices where the work often includes its own genesis.

The half-day concluded with practical considerations with Christophe Monnet and Emmanuelle Lefebvre, coordinator of my workshop for the Canopé network — calendar, permissions, coordination — but the essential was elsewhere: in this capacity we built together to bring technological innovation and artisanal creativity into dialogue, artistic ambition and pedagogical reality, the pleasure of creating. I left Lyon with the certainty that we would offer students a genuine experience of collective creation in unexplored territory, and the enthusiasm of the teachers present confirmed we were on the right track.