Early Observations

Peabody Atrium, New Haven

Date: January 11, 2026

Audience: Public gathering, families

Film: Namoo (11 min)

High foot traffic, eight headsets running continuously for two and a half hours. Estimated throughput between 50 and 100 people. The same question was asked at least three times by different people: “Will this be back next week? Can I see this somewhere again?”

What didn’t work: this was spectatorship, not a club. No email collection, minimal debriefing, no facilitated conversation. The session confirmed that scale and intimacy are genuinely in tension in this format, and that a museum atrium is probably not where the club format lives.

Key learning: High volume and low structure can generate interest but not the thing ISC is actually trying to build. The Peabody may be a discovery channel, not a venue unless they are hands on from the start. With workshopping, this could sit nicely within an Education / Audience Engagement department programming.

Finding Resonance

NEB Bookstore, New Haven

Date: January 24, 2026

Audience: Public gathering

Film: Child of Empire (17 min)

Small turnout with eleven people, partly attributable to extreme cold and an incoming snowstorm. The session was intimate and, within those conditions, strong. NEB is a collectively run, donation-based bookstore. The environment matched the project’s values in a way that felt immediate.

Participants wrote reflections, drew, and collaged in response to the film. The film covers the partition of India and Pakistan and prompted conversations that several participants noted they had never had before.

One participant experienced dizziness and could not complete the film. Several asked to be added to the mailing list.

Key learning: The right venue changes what is possible in the room. NEB produced the first session that felt like a genuine club. Small numbers in a well-matched space outperform large numbers in a mismatched one. The venue wants ISC to return.

Challenges

Date: January 31, 2026

Audience: Public gathering

Film: All I Know About Teacher Li

However, the majority of the cafe’s customers were not there for ISC, and converting ambient curiosity into participation required active facilitation.

Key learning: Cafes require the most day-of energy and produce the least predictable results. The format works better when the venue is already channeling a specific kind of audience toward the session.

Local Leadership

Howards Bookstore, Torrington

Audience: Public gathering

Films: All I Know About Teacher Li, Tales of Soda Island, Less than 5 Grams of Saffron, Flow… +

Audience: Public gathering

Local Leadership – Ember Wheeler, facilitator of the weekly poetry group started side by side in these questions. Torrington is a place with “a self esteem issue” according to the owner of the bookstore. But here, being part of this program, this group has been receptive to the club. This is thanks to the trust and reciprocity of the group and the real community emphasis. The focus is on sharing art making time together and the immersive story club becomes an added layer.

Access to new forms of WONDER

Spruce NEB Bookstore, New Haven

Date: February 8, 2026

Audience: Group of participants over 70, first-time VR users

Film: Notes on Blindness — abridged 360 version (7 min)

Notes on Blindness proved to be the right film for this group in a way that felt almost designed for it. The film is gentle, short, not spatially demanding, and philosophically rich. The facilitated conversation that followed touched on the relationship between sight and the perception of time, what memory would be without visual reference, what a tree would look like in the imagination of someone who had only ever heard one.

Several participants said they had always wanted to try VR but had never had access to it.

Key learning: Film selection is not secondary to facilitation, they are co-equal. The right film for a group can open a conversation that the facilitator could not open alone. Notes on Blindness is now a confirmed anchor film for older adult groups.

Peer to Peer Reflections

New Haven Public Library, Teen Advisory Board for Social Justice

Date: February 9, 2026

Audience: High school students, ages 14–17

Film: Notes on Blindness

The strongest documented session of the pilot. Forty-five to fifty percent of participants had tried VR before, but only games or demos, none had watched a VR story. Participants were paired, with the second person helping the first navigate the headset. That small structural choice produced something unexpected: sharing the technology became a way into the story, not a barrier to it.

The session used the film’s title as a pre-experience prompt, asking the group to reflect on what they expected the story to be about before watching it. This worked. The conversation after was sustained, open, and required very little facilitation pressure to keep going.

The Teen Librarian’s response afterward: “It made yesterday’s teen advisory board session the most interesting we’ve had.”

Key learning: ISC works best in spaces that already have a culture of conversation. The facilitation does not create that culture from nothing, it activates what is already latent.