It was bound to happen. When you work with the folks in the room who always want to be the first to take a risk, the first to play in a new sandbox, they're never going to be the ones to stay in their lanes. And when you talk to the first filmmakers who took the dive into making movies for virtual reality, it only stands to reason that they wouldn't stick with just VR forever.

"I think that VR movies were a stepping stone," says Edward Saatchi, whose company Fable is rebranding itself as a "virtual beings" company after launching as a VR film outfit just last year. "I think we should admit that VR movies are not going to replace cinema."

Evidence of this is all over this year's Sundance Film Festival. For years now, the Park City event has been a bellwether for the next trends in experimental filmmaking. Five years ago, Sundance's New Frontier program proved to be a launch pad for the VR filmmaking boom that was coming. In 2019, there are still a lot of virtual reality projects, many of them from longtime VR creators like Felix & Paul, but some, like Saatchi, are branching out and incorporating augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and connected devices into their interactive storytelling.

This is happening as traditional studios are just starting to get into the film-festival VR game. Disney, for example, brought a project called Cycles to Sundance this year—the studio's first-ever VR animated short. Three years ago, 20th Century Fox brought a VR experience based on The Martian. The list goes on and on. Meanwhile, VR films started getting the kind of seven-figure acquisition deals typically reserved for 2-D filmmakers who sold their movies to studios or cable outlets.

But as VR filmmaking got bigger, those who pioneered the form began looking at formats beyond those provided by VR headset manufacturers like Oculus, Samsung, and HTC. Part of it came from curiosity around new technologies like those coming from Magic Leap and Apple's ARKit. But the other part comes from changes in the marketplace, says Gabo Arora, cofounder of VR/AR/AI company Tomorrow Never Knows. In the boom years, lots of startups were getting into VR filmmaking, but cost, comfort, and complexity have limited the technology's consumer audience. (Turns out not everyone wants to strap a screen on their face!) So the innovators went looking for new platforms. It's a move that opens the on-ramp for new converts, and provides new ways to tell stories, but also means less folks are willing to invest time and money into something that's just VR.

"We're finally going into an experimental phase where people have to hustle and think about how new technologies can merge together," Arora says. "What's happening has kind of, in a Darwinian sense, purged the kind of get-rich-quick folks."

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Virtual Reality

Anyone who has stepped away from VR as a storytelling platform, though, has turned to a different medium instead—or been replaced by someone who has. Shari Frilot, who has curated New Frontier since long before VR came on the scene, notes that this year "not only is there an expansion of VR, there's also AR and AI and all these formats that are coming into play. The Magic Leap platform really promises to be something very significant." These new projects, she adds, focus more on "biodigital" interaction, which she defines as things as common as using an app like Lyft to get a car in the real world to something like Mica, a mixed reality/AI hybrid from Magic Leap that in its Sundance description says "I contemplate my place in your world. Be my collaborator … Join me at the beginning of my existence, to pull from the past and create the future." Creepy? Sure. But does it mean interactive filmmakers don't want you just sitting/standing around in some goggles? Yes.