Cape Town’s Virtual Reality Studio Wins Emmy for Immersive Theatre
Cape Town’s Virtual Reality Studio Wins Emmy for Immersive Theatre. Cape Town immersive studio Virtual Worlds Company has received international recognition after Uncanny Alley: A New Day won the Outstanding Emerging Media Program Emmy at the 78th Emmy Awards in Los Angeles.
The immersive theatre production was created in partnership with Los Angeles-based creative company Ferryman Collective and is performed live inside VRChat, a social virtual reality platform. The experience is set in Uncanny Alley, a virtual universe created by South African artist and worldbuilder Rick Treweek, also known in virtual reality as MetaRick.
Treweek attended the awards ceremony at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles and collected the Emmy on stage alongside the Ferryman Collective team.
“This one is for home,” Treweek said. “South Africa does not wait for perfect conditions. We build under load-shedding skies and still send a city across the ocean.”
Uncanny Alley: A New Day competed against Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema and The World of Fallout for the award.
The production places audiences in the role of escaped detainees attempting to flee Adaptive Learning Industries, a corporation preparing to erase its citizens’ memories. Two professional actors portray 15 characters in real time, while audience members must escape imprisonment, evade capture and decide whether to leave Uncanny Alley or remain and fight for their home.
Treweek created the Uncanny Alley universe in 2020 while living in Johannesburg during South Africa’s initial COVID-19 lockdowns. Its first narrative experience, The Search for Gh0st, was selected for Venice VR Expanded in 2021 and won the Spirit of Raindance Award in 2022.
Virtual Worlds Company later created more than 30 new environments specifically for Uncanny Alley: A New Day, designed to operate on standalone Meta Quest headsets.
The production premiered at Venice Immersive in 2024, where it won the Fanheart3 XR Fan Experience Award. It has since been presented at SXSW, Raindance Immersive, NewImages Festival, Augmented World Expo and SIGGRAPH, receiving further recognition, including an XR Immersive Award at Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan and Gold at the XRMust Awards.
The Emmy win came during a significant week for Treweek, who was also exhibiting at Continuum ’26 in Saudi Arabia with Gh0st Out The Shell, combining sculpture and virtual reality.
