On December 21, 2025, Ebenezer Scrooge is finally possessed by a disembodied spirit wearing a headset from Quest 2 onwards.
Then, the first fully fleshed-out story of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in consumer VR will be played on a loop around the holidays each year, playing a performance captured spatially through an agile lens.
Architect and producer Alex Coulomb wrote in a direct message: “One of the things we were finally able to accomplish on this vacation was a way to perfectly document everything that happens during a live show.” “Mo-cap, show cues, audio, and even audience action. And it’s completely playable on demand.”
Since 2021, Agile Lens has been putting together experimental VR telling of A Christmas Carol using the latest capture and streaming technologies, including Unreal’s MetaHuman avatar. This production, along with other Agile Lens projects such as a giant holodeck to sell real estate in Texas, led the group to develop a tool called “Stage Presence” for creating future theater-based productions in VR.
“We have no plans to shut down the app at this time. After the full day of VR replays on Christmas Eve, we’ll probably leave the app as a little museum where you can visit Charles Dickens’ study and see the old ‘Next Show…’ counter,” Coulombe wrote. “Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll find a good reason to bring him out of retirement.”
If you use a Quest 2 or newer VR headset, you’ll get free tickets to the final live show, which runs Friday through Sunday. The performance stars Ali Tarr as Dickens and Debbie Dear as Scrooge as the Ghost, both wearing Quest Pro headsets for facial and body capture. In this weekend’s fortune telling, you become a ghost yourself, appearing to Scrooge as a disembodied spirit and helping him come to terms with his actions.
Kevin Leibson, who worked on the production as a producer, said: “I’m really proud of it. I’m going to miss it a lot. It was a great pleasure and it was a great resource to come back to.” “You can never ruin a Christmas carol. We all know it and love it.”
“Maybe next year we’ll choose some dates to trigger some shared VR replays,” Coulombe wrote. “The ‘live’ audience will be there as ghosts of the ‘present’ alongside the ghosts of the ‘past’ audience. Everything will be very meta.”
We’re very interested to see what Agile Lens and its creators do next with theater in VR and their Stage Presence tools. There have been some memorable theatrical experiences like Under Presents and The Tempest, and many others have created in VR, but none have been able to keep a troupe of actors employed.
“VR live theater is great in terms of accessibility, but it’s still far from the ideal of real, breathing people gasping and laughing together in the same venue,” Coulombe writes. “So we’re excited about the opportunity to combine our mixed reality theater toolset with our virtual reality theater toolset to create productions that can both cater to on-site audiences and invite participants from around the world. That’s the goal of Stage Presence, a modular toolkit that services a wide range of live XR productions.”
