A Kommetjie resident has just won an Emmy for a piece of theatre that doesn’t have a stage, a theatre or even a physical set.

Instead, the audience puts on a VR headset.

Inside it, they find themselves in Uncanny Alley – a dystopian, cyberpunk world created by local artist and worldbuilder Rick Treweek, better known in virtual reality as MetaRick. There are actors, characters, a story and a set of choices to make. You can walk around, talk to other people and interact with what is happening around you.

So, what is Uncanny Alley: A New Day exactly?

Unlike a film or a conventional video game, the people performing the story are there with you, in real time.

That’s the part that can be difficult to explain if you’ve never experienced VR. So forget the technology for a moment. Think of it as a live theatre production where, instead of sitting in the audience watching the actors on stage, you step through the curtain and into the world of the play.

“You become part of the story,” Rick Treweek explains.

In Uncanny Alley: A New Day, up to six audience members arrive as if going to the theatre. They’ve bought a ticket, they get there at the same time. But instead of being at Broadway about to watch actors in a play, they enter into the virtual world of Uncanny Alley, as their own three-dimensional avatars, together with two real-life actors. The actors play 15 different characters during the performance, responding to the audience as the story unfolds. Most of the production is scripted, but a lot of it is improvised according to what the audience does and how individuals respond to what is happening.

Which means no two performances are quite the same.

How a virtual bar changed everything

A creative technologist who had worked across programming, game design “since the Nokia days”, animation (“my first job was actually at Triggerfish”), robotics and 3D printing, Rick’s golden thread and main curiosity had always been bringing characters to life and designing worlds for them to live in.

Raised in Kokstad in KwaZulu-Natal in a family of artists, he’s foremost a creative whose always had a knack for technology.

“But as an artist I always found using 3D software wasn’t very creative. Sketching 2D characters always felt creative, but then switching to keyboard and mouse just felt weird. Now, building in VR is like sculpting in virtual clay.”

Rick describes creating in VR as being like “painting in space” where you can actually draw with your hands, or “sculpting in virtual clay”. His creation process is really a lot like physically building in three dimensions. He can carve and mould, move around his creations, reach into them and shape characters and environments from every angle – building a world from the inside out.

And then in 2020, something changed. Back at the start of the pandemic, Rick’s interest in virtual worlds piqued – when the inability to gather in person made the idea of a shared digital space feel very different.

Suddenly VR offered something new. Rather than simply creating worlds and characters on a screen, he could build somewhere completely immersive that people could actually enter.

And so Rick created Uncanny Alley – a cyberpunk portal right out of lockdown:

A back alley of the internet – part arcade, part squat, part shrine to everything the polished corporate metaverse would never allow. He named it Uncanny Alley.

uncannyalley.io

The idea was not simply to make somewhere that looked interesting. It was to make somewhere people could spend time together.

That became apparent very early on, when Rick first started experimenting with VRChat, a social virtual reality platform. He created a virtual bar and threw a party, inviting musician Markus Wormstorm to DJ.

The following morning, Rick returned to the virtual bar and found that two people were still there – or rather, their avatars were. They had apparently forgotten to log out and were lying on the floor as crumpled digital bodies, while the chairs had been stacked on top of one another.

It sounds absurd, but for him it was a significant moment.

He had had conversations there. He had socialised. He had left and returned to find traces of other people remaining in the place he had built. It gave him what felt like real memories of somewhere that did not physically exist.

That sense of place is at the heart of what he continues to make.

When the audience becomes part of the cast

After Uncanny Alley in its original form, Rick developed a narrative, and expeditions with tasks and clues. And the story expanded beyond VRChat onto other platforms inviting solo journeys into open worlds.

Uncanny Alley: A New Day takes that idea a step further.

Meeting Los Angeles-based Ferryman Collective – pioneers of live immersive theatre in VR – turned Rick’s universe into something new.

The audience isn’t simply transported into a virtual environment to look around. They become participants in a live story.

They can talk to the characters. They can explore. They can make decisions. And those decisions can change what happens next.

It creates an unusual relationship between the audience and the performers. An actor has to respond not only to their fellow performers, but to a handful of people whose behaviour cannot be completely predicted.

For Rick, that’s where the experience starts to become theatre rather than simply an interactive digital experience.

And the story?

“It’s a black comedy. A dystopian look at the future and last stronghold against Big Meta. In this universe, corporates have taken over all data including the internet. And the only way people can escape or get around is by teleporting through toilet cisterns.”

Rick Treweek

The production was created with VR theatre company Ferryman Collective: Rick and his team built the virtual world while Ferryman brought its experience in live performance, writing and direction.

The result is something that sits somewhere between theatre, gaming and immersive art – although Rick is interested in pushing those boundaries rather than defining the work too neatly.

“There are no written rules for how immersive theatre works.”

A global creative practice, from Kommetjie

The technology can sound futuristic, but Rick’s working life is surprisingly grounded in a familiar South African reality.

He lives and works in Kommetjie, while collaborating with people in the United States and connecting with creative and technology communities around the world.

For someone working in an emerging medium, that ability to enter global communities without physically travelling to them is significant.

Rick sees VR as a way of connecting people across geographical and cultural boundaries. During the pandemic, he experienced that first-hand through virtual events and collaborations, including working with people from countries and cultures very different from his own.

“When you meet people in these spaces all the preconceived notions we have fall away. On these platforms you really connect intellectually via conversation. I’ve formed amazing friendships and relationships because of that.”

It has also changed what being geographically isolated can mean.

South Africa presents its own challenges for immersive creators – access to hardware, power interruptions and limited funding all add friction to a field that already has a relatively high barrier to entry. And so the networking potential of these tools is really exciting, says Rick.

And the quality of work coming out of South Africa is remarkable, he says, in part because local creators are accustomed to figuring things out themselves and taking on multiple roles to get a project made.

That resourcefulness is something he wants to help build on through his work with Electric South, where he has recently joined the board. Electric South’s labs support immersive and emerging media creators across the continent, and Rick Treweek is keen to raise the profile of the field and encourage more investment in it.

The weird stuff pays off

The Emmy recognition for Uncanny Alley: A New Day comes after years of Rick making work that doesn’t necessarily fit comfortably into an existing category.

He has previously described his biggest creative struggle as believing that his ideas were too weird and that nobody else would like them.

The irony, he says, is that his “weird moonlighting projects” have often been the things that brought him the most success.

Perhaps that’s part of what makes his work particularly interesting from a place like Kommetjie.

You don’t need to be a gamer to understand the impulse behind it. You don’t even need to be particularly interested in technology.

At its heart, Rick Treweek is making places for people to go – places that can be inhabited, explored and remembered, even though they don’t physically exist.

And the next version of Uncanny Alley is already in development.

The award itself – Outstanding Emerging Media Program – is an Emmy category created in 2002 to recognise outstanding creative achievement in integrated interactive experiences for linear TV programming. This year’s nominees included studio-backed productions from Blumhouse and the Fallout franchise, putting a project built from a home office in Kommetjie alongside some of the industry’s biggest names.

Watch the Emmy moment below.