Vancouver’s Creative Technology Community
Signals presented by DigiBC & VIFF is Canada’s immersive and interactive technology showcase, lab, and B2B event.
We invite audiences to explore the future of stories through creative technology from immersive experiences, gaming, and filmmaking. From professionals working in the industry to the next generation – there’s something for everyone. Co-presented by DigiBC and the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF), the expo ran from 2022 to 2025 exploring our connection to land, history, and human rights while confronting issues from authoritarianism to AI ethics.
We’re extremely proud of the 50+ projects that Signals presented since 2022 and want to thank curators Loc Dao, Debi Wong, and Loretta Todd for their groundbreaking work doing putting on an event that saw so many firsts including the final year projects SheManShe by Cameron Longboy and the Indigenous Mural that IM4 worked with a large community of elders to share stories that many people would never hear or be witness to. Read on below to hear where we’re headed from here in 2026 and 2027…
Video Games
XR
Virtual Production
AI
Signals is changing in 2026.
DigiBC Creative Tech Lab 2026, which was known as Signals XR Lab in 2024 and 2025 continues this year and DigiBC has partnered with MUTEK Village Numerique and MUTEK Forum. Check out Twenty Twenty-five by Ghazal Majidi and Sacred Tags by Quinn Hopkins in addition to the other amazing projects from Canadian artists like Vincent Morisset, Caroline Monnet, and more. August 20 – Sep 3, 2026 in Quartier des Spectacles in Montreal. This project is part of the Canadian Interactive Alliance’s network of labs and festivals across Canada supporting the presentation and export of creative technology projects, producers, and artists.
We’re very excited to announce that Beta Lounge & Indie Games Biz is becoming CanAsia and launching with Web Summit Vancouver May 24-29, 2027. Partners so far are Web Summit, Creative BC (Province of BC), Kabam (Netmarble), XP Gaming, Global Affairs Canada’s Trade Commissioner Service, BC’s Trade and Invest, and Invest Vancouver.
Signals Projects
Imagining Good Futures: Thunderbird Dreams
Imagining Good Futures: Thunderbird Dreams is an intergenerational XR mural that unites Indigenous youth, Elders, artists, and technologists in a shared exploration of care, sustainability, unity, and kinship.
Lili
In an Iranian city shrouded in secrets, Lili, the lonely wife of a militia commander, orchestrates a murder to secure her husband’s ascent within a corrupt regime.
Entropic Fields of Displacement
Entropic Fields of Displacement is an 8-channel audio video installation that brings together the lived experiences of women and marginalized gender individuals from West Asia, including Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Lebanon, whether living in their own cities or cities to which they have been displaced.
Wilfred Buck’s Star Stories
Designed for presentation in domes and planetariums, this 21-minute XR work brings to life four star stories, gathered and told by renowned Ininew (Cree) astronomer/star knowledge expert and author Wilfred Buck.
zensei ゼンセー
zensei ゼンセー is an electronic artist whose music immerses listeners like a dive into the unknown depths of the ocean.
Otherwise Fine
Otherwise Fine brings a signature blend of emotion and energy with a set rooted in the self-coined style, “Sleepy Bangers.”
Voxelite
Voxelite is a volumetric light sculpture featuring over 20,000 LEDs arranged in a cubic lattice, transforming three-dimensional space into a photon playground.
Ways of Knowing
Ways of Knowing explores Navajo Nation’s health and tradition through its enduring encounter with uranium mining.
Grandma Moon
Grandma Moon is a 5-minute fully animated VR immersive experience that transports the user from a noisy, polluted downtown city block into the heart of a tranquil forest, where the only sounds are the rustling leaves and gentle breezes.
A Walled City
Can we learn from the historical complexity of a decentralized city to imagine new systems that structure our future virtual habitation, where memory becomes architecture, identity is spatialized, and communities emerge through a rhizomatic network of collective presence?
ReVerie
ReVerie is a deeply introspective exploration of dreams through 3D generative AI.
Stellations
Stellations is a playable labyrinth that explores thought loops via game loops.
TamagotchU
TamagotchU is an AI agent driven creature interact with collections of emotional data generated in real-time from audience.
Rewind
Rewind is a VR journaling experience designed to create a safe, private, and tactile space for users to express themselves through voice, sound or letters.
Wildroot & Amber
Wildroot & Amber is an original collection of five compositions presented as an interactive installation created during an artist residency in Itoshima, Japan.
Ambrosia Sky
Ambrosia Sky is a first-person action game about cleaning up after a deadly, sentient contamination.
Rift x Voxelite
Step into the Kingdom of the Immortals in RIFT, an immersive interactive musical experience where you join the goddess Nüwa to save the world.
Situational Compliance
In this audio-visual interactive work, a system plays a game of Simon Says leveraging artificial intelligence and computer vision as a means to reflect on larger issues of public surveillance.
Fading Places
An otherworldly storm changes the city of Vancouver overnight, transforming its buildings into surreal, sentient spaces.
Ełeghàà ; All At Once
“Ełeghàà ; All At Once” presents multiple overlapping timelines of Denendeh (the Northwest Territories) spanning over thousands of years; the giant animals that roamed the North of the past, the present landscape, and the future infused with technology and habitable orbiting stations for our population as the world rebuilds itself.
Texada
Immersive animation of ancient geologic upheaval combines with 360 video from a present-day mining community in this poetic VR experience.
I Would Like to be Midnight I Would Like to be Sky
Artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin confronts the idea of sky ownership using innovative AI techniques to visually erase man-made structures in her landscape photography and morph hand-drawn animations.
Nocturnal Fugue
Explore an immersive bat world in this interactive AI project , where social vocalizations are reinterpreted as evocative music set against digital recreations of their natural habitats.
I’m tired of being Hyper-Surveiled
A concept album for the age of the metaverse, confronting surveillance on the marginalized body in America.
Ne Ki Rotiienáon (Their Legacy)
Step into Ne Ki Rotiienáon, an immersive VR journey for Oculus Quest, where you unravel the powerful, untold story of an Indigenous foster child, confronting the haunting legacy of Canada’s residential schools and the fight against cultural erasure.
AI & Me
Enter the confessional and let AI study you and see how AI imagines its own version of you. We’ve uploaded our lives on social media, why not confess to an AI?
Untitled Street Fighter Game
The evolution of 2D platform fighting games that enables players to craft their own custom moves within seconds, ensuring every match is a unique, strategic and personalized combat spectacle.
Capitol of Conformity
Set in a retro-futuristic metropolis, the film explores a world where the pursuit of joy has hidden costs.
Everyone is Chair
“Everyone Is Chair” is a short film about a woman whose obsession with inflatable chairs leads to a bizarre phenomenon.
Robort
With the help of generative AI, artist Nobody & the Computer brings to life their story about Robert and his struggle in a world where robots are integrated heavily into everyday life. Witten by a human and brought to the audience by AI, follow Robert’s story as he attempts to reclaim his passion for music.
Delivery Included
Delivery Included is a film that imagines a fictional ad for a puffer jacket, with a playful twist on the term “delivery included.” The film features drone-to-doorstep delivery, even if that doorstep is perched high up in a canyon.
We Are Entanglement
We Are Entanglement, inspired by the motif of the forest and its underground fungal network.
Tadǫetła ; Walk In A Circle
Tadǫetła; Walk In A Circle Experience a large scale projection mapping of Walk in a Circle by Dene artist Casey Koyczan.
SinkinSync: A Brainwave Synch Experience Enhancing Social Connectedness
Come experience a made for Signals gamified brain wave experience! SinkInSync presents the design and prototype of a cross-person EEG neurofeedback experience.
Meneath
Meneath, a unique installation experience created for SIGNALS, based on Métis creator Terril Calder’s installation Meneath: The Mirrors of Ethics, winner of the New Voices Award at New York’s Tribeca Festival.
Homeworld 3
Experience the first hands on exclusive sneak peek installation where you can play the upcoming Homeworld 3 by BlackBird Interactive and published by Gearbox months before its release in 2024.
New Kookums
This digital work represents the next generation of elders in spirit form within the woods as they safely assist those who have passed into the afterlife.
Ełeghàà ; All At Once (VR)
“Ełeghàà ; All At Once” (VR) This VR / 3D animated short film presents multiple overlapping timelines of Denendeh; the giant animals that roamed the North of the past, the present landscape, and the future infused with technology and habitable orbiting stations for our population as the world rebuilds itself.
Interactive Polyphonic Garden
The Interactive Polyphonic Garden is an interactive, ambisonic piece that intimately explores our relationship with the living, breathing and animate world.
Fae Farm
The interactive installation premiere of Fae Farm, where you create your own cozy home in the enchanted world of Azoria. Craft, cultivate, and decorate to grow your shared homestead—and use spells to explore the enchanted island of Azoria! You’ll forge new bonds with residents, discover fae magic, and trek across mysterious realms. And as the seasons change, you’ll use all you’ve learned and discovered together to restore the world around you.
Recollection
reCollection uses interactive AI to assemble and display synthetic collective memories based on language input. The AI system learns from Alzheimer patients’ visual and descriptive memories and then imagines new memories by interpreting real-time narratives from participants in the installation.
1000xRESIST Narrative Video Game
A narrative-based game featuring characters voiced by local asian-canadian actors. 1000xRESIST is an exploratory experience of walking through locations that traverse diverse and multiple timelines.
Echoes of Chinatown: A Walk with Goong Goong
Echoes of Chinatown: A Walk with Goong Goong is a two-part 180-degree video projection and AR installation exploring the history of Vancouver’s Chinatown through the use of memory.
IM4 Virtual Production Films (20 films)
Indigenous storytellers from across Turtle Island attended the first ever in the world Indigenous video production training program.
Unceded Chiefs VR
The Unceded Chiefs tells the story of Indigenous resistance to the Canadian government’s highly controversial 1969 proposal, the White Paper Policy.
Créaction: Symbiosis
Two people create an ephemeral painting in VR through their movement.
Union: Play the Memory Game
In the Year 3000, touch is forbidden, and memory becomes the ultimate commodity in the highly popular cyberworld GAEA. A treatise on surveillance capitalism, cultural memory and embodiment.
Sanctuary: A Tale of Two Forests
Take an ecological adventure through two distinct and threatened BC rainforests
Wasteland
This playful demo shows you the power and potential of real-time virtual production tools, letting you race a monster truck through a virtual 360 environment, while someone else controls the camera and nails “the shot”.
This is Not a Ceremony
You’re invited to witness an unforgettable cinematic VR experience, guided with care and kindness by tricksters, matriarchs and buffalo as you confront some of the darker sides of living life in Canada while Indigenous.
The Dark
A sneak peek of the first volumetric capture music video in Canada, which will ultimately be an immersive audiovisual experience, featuring Monstercat artists WHIPPED CREAM, Jasiah & Crimson Child.
Live from the Underworld
An operatic descent into the underworld using real-time motion capture and dramatic avatars puppeted by live performers.
Fruit Golf
Fruit Golf is an asymmetric multiplayer game that integrates VR and mobile devices in a shared social experience.