Meow Wolf & Future of 3D Immersive Arts: Getting Lost In a Flood of Imagination

I am posting this same essay across all three XR-related Meetup groups: VR New Mexico, 3D Immersive Arts NM, and Spatial Computing. Please come and discuss from your respective viewpoints. (If you just want to skip to the way cool 360 video, here you go!)

Meow Wolf and the Future of 3D Immersive Art: Experience, Performance, Technology

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” (The King to the White Rabbit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

I’ll start at my beginning, with respect to Meow Wolf (the #1 Immersive Experience in the U.S., according to Time Out), which was not in Santa Fe at all, but in language. At some point, perhaps in New Mexico Magazine, perhaps online, soon after my wife and I decided to retire to the Land of Enchantment, I read those two words: Meow Wolf.

They stuck.

Long before I set foot in the House of Eternal Return, those words echoed in my mind. Years earlier, as a graduate student in cognitive science, I studied meaning and semantic networks, how words spark associations, how seemingly unrelated terms can trigger delight, surprise, or dread. I even worked as a lexicographer for a time, shaping dictionary entries and thinking about how humans mentally connect symbols to concepts.

So when I first read "Meow Wolf," my brain fired in two directions at once: a soft feline whisper and a lupine howl. Comfort and menace. Pet and predator. Nonsense and omen. What a peculiar, strangely magnetic combination! Later I learned that the name was drawn randomly out of a hat (a Mad Hatter’s hat, perhaps?) but in retrospect it feels almost fated. The name captures exactly what Meow Wolf offers: the playful and the feral, the domestic and the cosmic, the nonsense that somehow makes more sense than sense.

The Practice of Getting Lost

My grandparents owned a farm with an adjacent stretch of old-growth forest and a vast field of corn. As a boy of seven or eight, I chose to get lost in both. Among twelve-foot stalks, I could imagine I was wandering through redwoods. In the forest, shadows lengthened into Middle Earth, whispering with elves... or stranger things.

I would always reach a tipping point: exhilaration shading into fear. Whispers, some imagined, some perhaps real, rose with the dusk. My child’s solution was always the same: pick a straight line, walk without turning, and eventually I’d break out, onto a golf course, a neighbor’s cow pasture, the edge of a familiar road. Relief washed in, quickly followed by exhilaration. I had been lost, and I had emerged.

Walking through Meow Wolf brought me back to that threshold state. A place where maps dissolve, where every door could lead to anything, where the safe kind of panic edges into thrill. A refrigerator opens onto a "mycelial" (fungal-like branching) hallway. A dryer spins you into a neon underworld. You can’t keep track, and that's not your job. The design teaches you to give in to being lost.

That is the genius of Meow Wolf: it restores us to a childlike state of safe disorientation. And in that state, the imagination floods in.

Meow Wolf, Virtual Reality, and the New Mexican Lineage

But Meow Wolf is not alone in this practice. It shares DNA with another world-maker: virtual reality.

Both VR and Meow Wolf replace linear storytelling with nonlinear discovery. Both demand curiosity over compliance. Both create “presence,” that feeling of being inside an environment rather than looking at it. In VR, you might teleport to a mountain ridge or open a virtual notebook that becomes a portal. In Meow Wolf, you might crouch through a fireplace or leaf through a family diary that reveals a hidden plot.

The difference is in the body. Meow Wolf immerses you in material textures: plywood walls, vibrating strings, the smell of candy and honey. VR immerses you in pixels and haptics: infinite skies, gravity-defying leaps, the soft resistance of a controller vibration. Meow Wolf requires pilgrimage, driving through high desert, watching mesas turn violet at sunset. VR can be summoned anywhere.

And both draw directly from the oldest immersive installation of all: the New Mexican landscape.

The high desert sky is a skydome projection that shifts every hour. The White Sands dunes are an endless procedural tiling, each grain repeating yet unique. The monsoon teaches pacing: long anticipation, sudden storm, rinsed clarity. Artists came to Taos and Santa Fe a century ago for the same reason VR developers gather here today: the land itself is already surreal, already immersive.

Toward the Future of 3D Immersive Art

So what does this mean for the future of 3D immersive art?

It means our experiments in VR and installations like Meow Wolf are not novelties but continuations of a deeper regional tradition: training people to attend, to notice, to lose themselves safely and come back transformed.

Imagine Meow Wolf with optional VR overlays, augmented layers only visible through a headset or, increasingly, smart glasses, whispering alternate narratives into the rooms. Imagine VR experiences that borrow the logic of Meow Wolf’s design, diegetic portals, tactile clues, nonlinear story shards, and anchor them in a sense of pilgrimage, not just convenience.

Our XR community in New Mexico sits in the perfect crossroads for this. We gather in meetups, in museums, in breweries and clubs, to test new ways of making presence together. Every gasp of a first-timer in VR echoes the gasp of a child pulling open a refrigerator door in Santa Fe. Every collaborative VR performance rehearses the same logic of shared wonder that Meow Wolf proves works in physical space.

The boundary between plywood and polygon, between neon corridor and shader effect, between Santa Fe pilgrimage and headset teleport, is porous. What holds steady is the ethic: curiosity rewarded, presence cultivated, disorientation welcomed, wonder restored.

Nonlinear, Like the Work Itself

Well now. Obviously I have not followed the King’s advice to the White Rabbit. I have bounced around. I have been nonlinear, associative, digressive. But then so is Meow Wolf. So is VR at its best. So is the New Mexican landscape itself.

Maps fail. Portals multiply. Storylines dissolve into branching streams. And the right response is not frustration but surrender: to wander, to listen, to get lost safely, and to find yourself surprised at where you emerge.

That’s what Meow Wolf gave me. That’s what VR can give us. And that’s what New Mexico has always given anyone willing to look, listen, and step through the next unlikely portal.

Meow Wolf has expanded to four locations outside of New Mexico and will soon open in Los Angeles and New York. I want to think these will be extradimensional wormholes through which New Mexican nonlinear magic extrudes worldwide.

Addendum

"Well now."

Those two words remind me. I created a five-minute 360 video about Meow Wolf, in which Liam Neeson (Disclaimer: AI-generated!) describes Meow Wolf from the perspective of an old New Mexico cowboy, who begins at his beginning, with "Well now.":

Old New Mexico Cowboy on Meow Wolf: Immersive Art About Immersive Art (narrated 360, use VR headset, or at least pan around!)

I'll bring along a couple of VR headsets, in case you'd like to view this 360 video immersively.