From an immersive connection with European Researchers’ Night to a century-old vampire brought into extended reality, HEAT is heading to Brașov for three days of live music, experimentation and research.
From 25 to 27 September 2026, the historic Weavers’ Bastion in Brașov, Romania, hosts the 8th edition of the Transilvania Blues Festival. This year, alongside three days of live music, the festival provides a real-world stage for HEAT to explore how immersive technologies can transform the way audiences experience live performing arts.
Rather than separating technological research from artistic practice, the festival offers an opportunity to bring the two together: musicians perform for an audience in a historic venue while HEAT technologies explore new ways for people in other locations to experience and participate in that same live moment.
Starting with European Researchers’ Night
HEAT’s involvement begins on Friday, 25 September, when immersive technology will be used to connect the Transilvania Blues Festival with European Researchers’ Night.
The immersive transmission provides an opportunity to demonstrate HEAT research in the context for which it is being developed: a real live performance, with real artists and audiences.
It also reflects one of the central questions behind HEAT: how can extended reality create a meaningful sense of presence for someone who is not physically inside the performance venue?
A conventional livestream allows an audience to watch an event remotely. HEAT is investigating what becomes possible when the remote experience becomes spatial and immersive, giving participants a stronger sense of being within the performance environment.
From blues to Blüesferatü
The three-day festival culminates on Sunday, 27 September, with an unusual encounter between cinema, blues and extended reality.
Blüesferatü – Eine Symphonie des Blues reimagines F. W. Murnau’s landmark 1922 silent film Nosferatu through an original soundtrack performed live by six musicians.
The performance combines blues with Romanian musical influences, including elements associated with doina and lăutărească traditions. At the same time, the century-old story is revisited through contemporary themes including migration, displacement and belonging.
For HEAT, Blüesferatü is also the setting for the XRBlues pilot.
A stage that exists in two spaces
During XRBlues, HEAT technologies extend what is happening at the Weavers’ Bastion beyond the physical venue.
The musicians can be volumetrically captured and reconstructed in 3D, bringing their live performances into an extended reality environment. A digital representation of the venue allows remote participants to experience the performance spatially, while spatial audio changes the listening experience according to the participant’s position.
The ambition is therefore not simply to reproduce a concert on another screen.
Instead, XRBlues investigates how a remote audience can experience a greater sense of presence, agency and participation in a live cultural event.
The historic stage in Brașov and its virtual counterpart become interconnected parts of the same performance experience.
Research meets the reality of live performance
Bringing experimental technologies into a live festival is particularly valuable for HEAT.
A concert venue presents conditions that cannot be fully recreated in a laboratory. Musicians move and interact. Audiences respond. Sound, lighting and spatial conditions change. Technology has to become part of an existing artistic and production environment without taking attention away from the performance itself.
The Transilvania Blues Festival therefore provides much more than a setting for a technology demonstration. It creates an opportunity to understand how HEAT technologies function as part of an authentic cultural experience.
From Friday’s immersive connection with European Researchers’ Night to Sunday’s XRBlues performance, the three-day programme allows HEAT to explore these questions through practice.
A European collaboration
XRBlues brings together almost two years of research, technological development and experimentation across the HEAT consortium.
The work involves Transilvania Arts & Events, Transilvania University of Brașov, i2CAT, University of Cagliari, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), Dublin City University and Orange Romania, combining expertise in performing arts, immersive media, telecommunications, spatial audio, and extended reality, and with Adaptemy’s support towards the evaluation activities around XRBlues.
The evaluation will help HEAT understand not only whether the technology works, but also something equally important: what the experience actually means for the people using it.
Three days, two interconnected spaces
The 8th Transilvania Blues Festival runs from 25–27 September 2026 at the Weavers’ Bastion in Brașov.
HEAT’s immersive activities begin on Friday with the connection to European Researchers’ Night and culminate on Sunday with Blüesferatü and the XRBlues pilot.
A historic bastion, a 1922 film, live blues musicians and cutting-edge immersive technologies may seem to belong to very different worlds.
For three days in Brașov, they will share the same stage.
And that stage will exist in more than one place.
