What do Sacha Baron Cohen, Glenn Close and Carey Mulligan have in common? This astounding Oscars XR red carpet experience

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The Hollywood Reporter (THR) has partnered to launch an innovative XR experience, “The Immersive Red Carpet and Roundtable Experience,” which brings the Oscars red carpet right into your living room. With this immersive experience, viewers can see and interact with this year’s Academy Awards nominees for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress and more through an audio-enabled augmented reality (AR) experience. Click below to experience.

The pandemic may have led to a year of social distancing, but thanks to Yahoo’s new partnership with The Hollywood Reporter, entertainment fans across the world will now have a chance to virtually experience the red carpet in up-close-and-personal fashion.

Today, The Hollywood Reporter became the latest partner for the Yahoo News XR Partner Program, which leads the digital media industry in XR storytelling by reimagining traditional content in fully immersive and interactive forms. Their maiden project, “The Immersive Red Carpet and Roundtable Experience,” is a spin-off of the trade publication’s Oscar Roundtable video series profiling the year’s Academy Awards nominees, and thrusts viewers directly into the spotlight alongside some of Hollywood’s finest artists.

Whether on a desktop or a mobile device, The Immersive Red Carpet provides an exclusive seat to the glitz and glamour of the biggest night in entertainment, allowing users to view and interact with some of this year’s top Oscar nominees through an audio-enabled augmented reality (AR) experience. Enhanced by 3D images of your favorite stars walking the carpet and sound bites taken from THR’s Roundtable series, it features commentary — from the likes of Glenn Close, Gary Oldman and Emerald Fennell — that’s both humorous and insightful, and provides a window into not only 2020’s most acclaimed films, but also the motivations behind making them and the hoped-for impact they’ll have on the world at large.

Speaking over the cheers of fans and the snapping of photographers’ cameras, Best Supporting Actor nominee Sacha Baron Cohen remarks about The Trial of the Chicago 7, “The cast was so good that at times I was scared I was going to turn into a spectator at this Aaron Sorkin play that I had front row seats at.” Regarding the #MeToo movement’s influence on Hollywood and Promising Young Woman, Best Actress nominee Carey Mulligan opines, “I think that people are watching, and hopefully that has a bigger impact than just how it feels for us as actors.” Meanwhile, Nomadland director Chloé Zhao admits that moviemaking can be akin to a maternal juggling act, stating: “There’s always three babies on set for me — there’s the cast, there’s the world, and there’s a camera.”

Powered in part by Yahoo Ryot Lab, Verizon Media’s award-winning innovation creative content studio, Yahoo’s proprietary platform (which launched in 2019) empowers journalists with cutting-edge digital tools that let them experiment and innovate to create unique augmented-reality formats for a 5G-powered 21st century. Compatible with every aspect of the media landscape — be it news, sports, finance, entertainment and wellness — the XR Partner Program aims to revolutionize the industry by transforming the way media is produced and consumed.

“Our Yahoo News XR Partner Program was created in an effort to support our partners with groundbreaking technology that embraces immersive storytelling and experiences,” says Joanna Lambert, head of consumer at Verizon Media. “We are thrilled to join forces with an incredible partner like The Hollywood Reporter as we continue to connect our audiences to their passions and expand celebrity coverage and entertainment conversation in innovative new ways, using immersive technologies to allow our audiences to be active participants in the topics and issues that matter most to them.”

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