South African artist and virtual worldbuilder Rick Treweek has won an Emmy Award for "Uncanny Alley: A New Day", an immersive theatre production created in collaboration with Cape Town studio Virtual Worlds Company and Los Angeles-based Ferryman Collective.
The production took home Outstanding Emerging Media Program at the 78th Creative Arts Emmys at Los Angeles’ Peacock Theatre on Saturday, beating fellow nominees Blumhouse Enhanced Cinema and The World of Fallout.
Treweek, formerly from Kokstad in KwaZulu-Natal and now living in Kommetjie in the Western Cape, was in the audience for the ceremony, where he joined the Ferryman Collective team on stage to accept the award.
“This one is for home,” said Treweek, known in virtual reality as MetaRick.
“South Africa does not wait for perfect conditions. We build under loadshedding skies and still send a city across the ocean,” he said.
"Uncanny Alley: A New Day" is performed live inside VRChat, the social virtual reality platform, and takes place in Uncanny Alley, a cyberpunk virtual universe created by Treweek.
In the experience, audiences become escaped detainees fleeing Adaptive Learning Industries, a corporation intent on erasing its citizens’ memories.
Guided by two professional actors who portray 15 characters in real time, participants must escape imprisonment, evade capture and ultimately decide whether to abandon Uncanny Alley or stay and fight for their home.
No two performances are the same.
The Emmys ceremony also provided an unexpected local connection. Among the highlights of his trip was meeting fellow Deep South resident Marcus Hebbelmann, who was part of Survivor’s Emmy-nominated camera team for the third consecutive year.
“The whole event was remarkable, especially the Governors Gala afterwards. It was incredible just being in the room with so much talent and creativity,” Treweek said.
His mother was the first person he called after the win, in the middle of the night in South Africa.
“And then everyone in Kokstad knew,” he joked.
Treweek began creating "Uncanny Alley" in 2020 while living in a Johannesburg flat during South Africa’s strict initial Covid-19 lockdown.
Unable to gather with other people in person, he set out to create a place where people could once again stand alongside one another, albeit virtually. The result was a cyberpunk back alley of the internet that has since grown into an award-winning fictional universe.
The universe’s first narrative experience, "The Search for Gh0st", was selected for Venice VR Expanded in 2021 and won the Spirit of Raindance Award in 2022.
In 2024, Treweek and Ferryman Collective, a non-profit VR theatre company, started discussing the idea of a live theatrical performance inside the universe.
Rather than stage the show in the existing world, Virtual Worlds Company built an entirely new one for the production: more than 30 environments, engineered to run on standalone Meta Quest headsets.
Ferryman founders Stephen Butchko and Deirdre V. Lyons wrote and directed the immersive theatre experience. Ferryman technical director Christopher Lane Davis, who works as Screaming Color, contributed original visual effects and music, as well as helping to control the live show.
"Uncanny Alley: A New Day" premiered in competition at Venice Immersive 2024, where it won the Fanheart3 XR Fan Experience Award.
It has since been presented at SXSW, Raindance Immersive, NewImages Festival, Augmented World Expo and SIGGRAPH, winning the XR Immersive Award at Kaohsiung Film Festival in Taiwan and Gold at the XRMust Awards, among other accolades.
The Emmy capped a remarkable week for Treweek, who was also exhibiting at Continuum ’26 in Saudi Arabia, which opened two nights before the awards ceremony.
As a mentor-artist for the exhibition, he presented "Gh0st Out The Shell", a work combining sculpture and virtual reality to examine the relationship between physical and virtual identity.
“I cast Gh0st in bronze for the exhibition, so she arrived in the real world at the same time she was up for awards at the Emmys, which is quite cool,” said Treweek.
The Emmy win is unlikely to mark the end of the journey for "Uncanny Alley".
Treweek is already considering ways to expand the universe beyond immersive theatre, including toys, 360-degree dome experiences and Steam games.
For now, however, there is one immediate practical problem.
“I’ve got to figure out how to fly with this trophy. It’s rather heavy,” he said.
culture_thenational@nationalmg.co.za