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The Southbank Centre will present the UK premiere of Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang at the Royal Festival Hall from September 9, 2026 to January 3, 2027, part of the venue’s 75th anniversary season. The mixed-reality experience is produced by VIVE Arts, HTC’s arts-and-technology initiative, and immersive studio Atlas V, in collaboration with production partner Lightroom.
For context, HTC VIVE is a LEXRA Board member. VIVE Arts is the group inside HTC that has spent the last several years producing immersive art and cultural projects with museums, galleries, and now major performance venues. Southbank Centre is one of the largest arts complexes in Europe. Yuja Wang is a globally-known concert pianist with a fanbase that shows up for her.
Playing With Fire places the audience inside a volumetric capture of Yuja Wang performing at a Steinway Spirio player piano. Wearing VIVE Focus Vision headsets, visitors move freely around her as the experience shifts between mixed reality and virtual reality depending on how close they stand to the piano. The Southbank Centre notes that Wang does not appear in person; the experience is a virtual concert built from a recording session Lightroom produced with her in September 2024, played back on a Spirio piano.
The piece is written and directed by Pierre-Alain Giraud, winner of the Best Immersive Work Award at Cannes in 2024, with visual design by Icelandic artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir and spatial audio by Nicolas Becker. Wang personally curated the repertoire, which spans Ravel, Debussy, Bach, Stravinsky, Liszt, Prokofiev, Brahms, and Chopin, built around fire as a symbol of human creativity.
Mixed-reality concert experiences have precedent: KAGAMI brought Ryuichi Sakamoto back to the stage through see-through augmented-reality headsets. Playing With Fire runs on VIVE Focus Vision’s full-color passthrough optics, which can render fully opaque virtual environments that see-through optics cannot.
Excurio has Horizon of Khufu in cultural venues. Small Creative has been doing museum work. Wevr has cultural-content history. VIVE Arts has been the HTC-funded arm making a series of these bets across visual art, music, and heritage content. Playing With Fire is another entry in that pattern, with the twist that it’s built around a living performer with a mainstream classical audience rather than a heritage IP or a static art installation.
The experience runs in the Royal Festival Hall’s Spirit Level space on Level 1. Tickets are on sale from £26, and the Southbank Centre has set aside 750 tickets at £13.50 for performances between September 10 and 27, 2026 to mark its 75th anniversary.
The full production stack is public: VIVE Arts and Atlas V produce, Lightroom is production partner, Studio Albyon handles the technical build, and Steinway & Sons, the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée), and Pictanovo support the project. Whether the piece tours after London has not been announced. Lightroom is separately developing a new project with Wang for its own large-scale immersive space in London.
“Playing With Fire not only showcases technical innovation, but channels it into a powerful, intimate encounter with the creative process of one of the world’s most prodigious performers,” said Celina Yeh, executive director of VIVE Arts.
VIVE Arts sits in an interesting spot. HTC makes the headsets, VIVERSE runs the platform layer, and VIVE Arts funds the content that fills prestige venues with people who wouldn’t normally show up to a VR arcade. That vertical integration is the whole point. Every VIVE Arts project is a proof point that HTC’s stack can host serious cultural content, and every prestige venue that runs one of these becomes a reference for the next.
For operators outside the cultural-institution tier, this doesn’t change tomorrow’s schedule. Southbank Centre is a fundamentally different business than a competitive-socializing venue in a suburban market. What it does do is add another data point to the pattern the industry has been watching: XR is now welcome in venues that would have laughed at it five years ago.
That matters because prestige-venue programming builds cultural credibility for the medium. When a Southbank Centre or a museum or a national concert hall runs an XR experience, it moves the format out of the “tech curiosity” slot and into the “legitimate cultural offering” slot. That reputation compounds. Local operators eventually benefit when the guest walking into their venue has already had a serious XR experience somewhere else and knows the medium can deliver.
Yuja Wang draws a fanbase of concert-hall regulars, classical-music streamers, and the younger classical audience that follows her on Instagram. Bringing that specific audience into a mixed-reality format is the interesting bet here. Classical-music audiences are not the same demographic as the XR early adopters who filled the first wave of VR arcades. They’re older on average, they have more disposable income, and they show up to concert halls because live performance matters to them.
Building an XR experience around a living performer they already care about is a way to get that audience to try the medium. If the experience delivers, they walk out as a potential customer for anything else in the format. If it doesn’t, they walk out reinforcing the “VR isn’t for me” position they probably had going in.
This is the fan-expectation risk that comes with any IP-driven XR project. Yuja Wang’s audience will show up with high expectations of her artistry. The mixed-reality layer needs to add to that, not distract from it.
The pattern of prestige cultural venues programming XR content continues to build. Southbank Centre in London joins a growing list of institutions bringing immersive experiences into their season alongside orchestras, dance, and theatre. HTC’s VIVE Arts is one of the most consistent funders in that space, and the fact that they’re backing a project built around a mainstream classical artist rather than a heritage IP is worth noting on its own.
For LBEXR operators, this is another gatekeeper saying yes. Southbank Centre programming XR content the way they program a piano recital is the kind of credibility marker that filters into how the wider culture perceives the medium. That takes time to show up in a suburban FEC’s foot traffic, but the direction of travel keeps moving in one direction.
For content developers and cultural-experience platform companies (Excurio, Wevr, Small Creative, Univrse, VIVE Arts, and others), this is the market you’re all building for. The prestige-venue tier is small in count but large in cultural weight, and every project that runs there raises the ceiling for what’s possible in the format.
What is Playing With Fire: An Immersive Odyssey with Yuja Wang?
It’s a mixed-reality experience built around a volumetric recording of concert pianist Yuja Wang. The UK premiere runs at London’s Royal Festival Hall from September 9, 2026 to January 3, 2027 as part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary season.
Who is producing the Yuja Wang mixed-reality experience?
VIVE Arts, the arts-and-technology arm of HTC, produces the experience with immersive studio Atlas V and production partner Lightroom, supported by Steinway & Sons, the CNC, and Pictanovo. HTC is a LEXRA Board member.
Does Yuja Wang appear in person at Playing With Fire?
No. The Southbank Centre notes the experience is a virtual concert featuring a pre-recorded, volumetrically captured performance of Wang, played back on a Steinway Spirio player piano.
How much are tickets for Playing With Fire at the Southbank Centre?
Tickets start at £26. A limited allocation of 750 tickets at £13.50 is available for performances between September 10 and 27, 2026, marking the venue’s 75th anniversary.
Why do cultural-institution XR projects matter for the location-based entertainment industry?
Prestige-venue programming builds cultural credibility for XR as a medium. When institutions like Southbank Centre run immersive experiences alongside their traditional programming, it shifts public perception of the format from tech novelty to legitimate cultural offering, which benefits the wider LBEXR category over time.
Updated July 17, 2026: an earlier version of this story, based on initial trade coverage, reported a May premiere and speculated about the project’s format and lineage. Run dates, production credits, format, and pricing above come from the Southbank Centre’s May 14, 2026 press release.
