When South Africa entered one of its strictest COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, artist and worldbuilder Rick Treweek was looking for a way to feel close to people again. What started with a virtual bar, a DJ set and a handful of avatars would eventually become Uncanny Alley, a sprawling cyberpunk universe now at the centre of an Emmy-nominated immersive theatre production.
Uncanny Alley: A New Day, created by Treweek’s Cape Town-based Virtual Worlds Company in collaboration with Los Angeles-based Ferryman Collective, is nominated for Outstanding Emerging Media Program at the 2026 Primetime Creative Arts Emmys. The production is one of three nominees in the category and will compete against Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema and The World of Fallout.
The production takes place entirely inside VRChat, transforming the social VR platform into a live theatre environment where audiences become part of the story. Two professional actors perform 15 characters in real time, while audience members navigate the world, make decisions and influence how their experience unfolds.
But before Uncanny Alley became an internationally recognised piece of immersive work, Treweek had to discover why virtual reality could matter to him in the first place.
The Virtual Bar That Changed Everything
Treweek had already worked in VR for years, but social VR had never really captured his imagination. Then COVID changed the circumstances around it.
During lockdown, Treweek and his partner Taryn were living in Johannesburg with their dog. With South Africa under severe restrictions and physical socialising largely impossible, he decided to give VRChat another chance.
The first thing almost everyone does in VRChat, he says, is build a bar.
Treweek hosted an event there with DJ Markus Wormstorm. When he returned to the virtual world the next morning, he found two avatars still lying on the floor because their owners had forgotten to log out. The chairs had been stacked on top of one another.
It sounds absurd. For Treweek, it was transformative.
He realised that the virtual environment had given him something he had been missing: the feeling of actually having been somewhere with other people.
“You put on a headset, and suddenly presence is real again,” he says. “Eye lines. Body language. Leaning in to hear better.”
For someone interested in bringing imaginary characters into the world, that sense of presence opened up an entirely new creative possibility.
Building a Home for the Weird
Treweek had always been interested in strange characters and worlds, but he wanted to push beyond the familiar rooms, galleries and social spaces he was seeing in VRChat.
“A lot of VRChat felt like a room or a bar. I wanted to know if I could build something that felt like a universe.”
That universe became Uncanny Alley.
The name plays with the idea of the uncanny valley, the unsettling feeling created when something appears almost human but not quite. Treweek’s own characters had often been described as uncanny, and he decided to stop treating that strangeness as a problem.
Instead, he gave it a home.
“We don’t climb out of The Uncanny Valley here. We lean in.”
Uncanny Alley became a cyberpunk back alley of the internet, described by Treweek as “part arcade, part squat, part shrine to everything the polished corporate metaverse would never allow.”
The world’s first narrative experience, The Search for Gh0st, was selected for Venice VR Expanded in 2021 and later won the Spirit of Raindance Award in 2022. The universe continued expanding until it caught the attention of Ferryman Collective, a Los Angeles VR theatre company.
When Theatre Entered the Metaverse
Treweek first encountered Ferryman as an audience member at its VR theatre production Gumball Dreams. The company later attended The Search for Gh0st, and the two creative teams recognised a natural connection.
Treweek had been exploring interactive worlds through non-player characters. Ferryman was using live theatre performers.
The two approaches eventually collided.
In 2024, the teams began developing Uncanny Alley: A New Day. Rather than simply adapting the existing virtual world, Virtual Worlds Company built an entirely new environment for the production, creating more than 30 spaces designed to run on standalone Meta Quest headsets. Ferryman founders Stephen Butchko and Deirdre V. Lyons wrote and directed the production, while Christopher Lane Davis contributed visual effects, music and live show controls.
The result is theatre without a physical stage. Audiences become escaped detainees fleeing Adaptive Learning Industries, a corporation preparing to erase its citizens’ memories. They move through the world alongside live actors, with no two performances unfolding exactly the same way.
For Treweek, that unpredictability is part of the appeal.
Giving the Characters a Life of Their Own
The leap from animation to immersive theatre is not as strange as it might initially sound.
Treweek’s career has been shaped by a persistent question: how can he make his characters feel more alive?
His first job was in animation at Triggerfish, where he learned the basics of making characters move. Later came a phone game, followed by experiments in 3D printing and mechatronics.
Each new medium answered one question and created another.
Could he interact with his characters? Could they have a brain? Could they exist in the physical world? Could they move?
VRChat eventually offered another answer.
“Then VRChat came along, and now I could be inside my character, and look at myself in a mirror.”
Immersive theatre became another iteration of the same pursuit. This time, however, Treweek had to relinquish some control.
Actors would inhabit his characters and make choices he could not predict.
“There’s something very magical about that,” he says.
It is a fitting evolution for a creative practice built around curiosity. Treweek has spent years finding new technologies that allow his imaginary worlds to become increasingly tangible. Uncanny Alley: A New Day simply pushes that question further by allowing other people to enter the world and participate in it.
The Weird Projects Were Never the Distraction
The Emmy nomination arrives after Uncanny Alley: A New Day premiered in competition at Venice Immersive in 2024, where it won the Fanheart3 XR Fan Experience Award. It has since appeared at SXSW, Raindance Immersive, NewImages Festival, Augmented World Expo and SIGGRAPH, while picking up further recognition including the XR Immersive Award at Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan.
For Treweek, the recognition is also a challenge to one of his oldest creative insecurities.
His fear, he says, was always that his work was “too weird” and that nobody would like it.
Eventually, he realised that the projects he made on the side, without necessarily knowing where they would lead, were often the ones that created the biggest opportunities.
That lesson feels particularly relevant in an industry where emerging technologies can make the creative path look uncertain. Treweek’s work did not begin with a predetermined route to the Emmys. It began with experimentation, a lockdown curiosity and a willingness to follow an idea into increasingly unfamiliar territory.
For South African creatives interested in immersive storytelling, he recommends looking into Electric South’s labs, which he credits with helping develop immersive content on the continent.
His advice is simple:
“Remove the fear. Whatever you break, you can build again.”
What Comes After “What Is VR?”
Treweek, who grew up in Kokstad and now lives in Kommetjie, will be in Los Angeles when the winner is announced at the 78th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards on 5 September.
Whatever happens on the night, Uncanny Alley has already made a compelling case for what South African creatives can build when they stop waiting for a conventional format to give them permission.
A lockdown experiment became a virtual universe. The virtual universe became a theatre. The theatre travelled internationally. Now it is sitting alongside major studio-backed immersive projects at the Emmys.
And after years of explaining the medium itself, Treweek has one question he hopes he will eventually stop hearing:
“What is VR?”
